Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- 1 The Michigan plays
- 2 The Golden Years, The Half-Bridge, Boro Hall Nocturne
- 3 The radio plays
- 4 The Man Who Had All the Luck
- 5 Focus
- 6 All My Sons
- 7 Death of a Salesman
- 8 Arthur Miller: time-traveller
- 9 An Enemy of the People
- 10 The Crucible
- 11 A Memory of Two Mondays
- 12 A View from the Bridge
- 13 Tragedy
- 14 The Misfits
- 15 After the Fall
- 16 Incident at Vichy
- 17 The Price
- 18 The Creation of the World and Other Business
- 19 The Archbishop's Ceiling
- 20 Playing for Time
- 21 The shearing point
- 22 The American Clock
- 23 The one-act plays: Two-Way Mirror, and Danger: Memory!
- 24 The Ride Down Mount Morgan
- 25 The Last Yankee
- 26 Broken Glass
- 27 Mr Peters' Connections
- 28 Resurrection Blues
- 29 Finishing the Picture
- 30 Fiction
- 31 Arthur Miller as a Jewish writer
- Notes
- Index
3 - The radio plays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- 1 The Michigan plays
- 2 The Golden Years, The Half-Bridge, Boro Hall Nocturne
- 3 The radio plays
- 4 The Man Who Had All the Luck
- 5 Focus
- 6 All My Sons
- 7 Death of a Salesman
- 8 Arthur Miller: time-traveller
- 9 An Enemy of the People
- 10 The Crucible
- 11 A Memory of Two Mondays
- 12 A View from the Bridge
- 13 Tragedy
- 14 The Misfits
- 15 After the Fall
- 16 Incident at Vichy
- 17 The Price
- 18 The Creation of the World and Other Business
- 19 The Archbishop's Ceiling
- 20 Playing for Time
- 21 The shearing point
- 22 The American Clock
- 23 The one-act plays: Two-Way Mirror, and Danger: Memory!
- 24 The Ride Down Mount Morgan
- 25 The Last Yankee
- 26 Broken Glass
- 27 Mr Peters' Connections
- 28 Resurrection Blues
- 29 Finishing the Picture
- 30 Fiction
- 31 Arthur Miller as a Jewish writer
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Writing for Cavalcade of America largely meant writing to order. In a preface he wrote to a collection of radio plays, he explained, with some irony, the process that lay behind the Du Pont-sponsored series. The particular play that prompted his remarks was a later work, dating from the final year of the war. Grandpa and the Statue was designed to celebrate the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of American values and a wartime alliance, but it can stand as a comment on a number of the plays he was required to grind out and his professed attitude to them:
Grandpa and the Statue came out the way it did because I could not bear to do another Statue of Liberty show that would illustrate how friendly we are to France and how it will stand forever as a symbol of a symbol and so on. I believe the government and the Radio Writers' Guild ought to get together and decide on one Statue of Liberty script once and for all, and when the anniversary comes around just do it instead of making every writer knock his brains out trying to get a new idea about it. Everything that needs to be said about it was said by Emma Lazarus anyway.
The story behind the script is the same as the story behind most Cavalcade scripts, and probably all other radio scripts. The man in the advertising office has a calendar with all the national holidays and celebrations and so on marked on it.[…]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Arthur MillerA Critical Study, pp. 40 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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