No Villain, the play Miller recalls writing in the spring of 1935 rather than return to his family home, lays his new Marxist credentials on the table from the very beginning, with an epigraph from Friedrich Engels: ‘Now for the first time a class arose which, without in any way participating in production, won for itself the directing role over production as a whole and threw the producers into economic subjection; a class which made itself the indispensable mediator between every two producers and exploited them both.’

No Villain (in subsequent revised versions also known as They Too Arise and The Grass Still Grows) draws very directly on his family life. It opens in the parlour of a six-room home in ‘a suburb of New York City’, plainly the Millers' Brooklyn house on East Third Street. The Simons are an immigrant family, once successful but now fallen on hard times. They anxiously await the return of their son, Arnold (in several places referred to as Art, Miller's name), from the University of Michigan.

The father, Abe Simon (Miller's uncle was called Abe), is, like Miller's own father, the energetic but illiterate head of a coat company. Also like Isadore Miller, he had once been a salesman and, like him, is now in financial difficulties, lacking the money even to send his son the bus fare to return from the university. His wife's father, like Miller's grandfather, who had also been in the garment industry, lives with them.