In his long career, Arthur Miller has charted some of the most hidden aspects of the American character, and made us recognize ourselves. With Homely Girl, A Life, he turns his attention to a smaller, more intimate, canvas, but one that in its deceptive delicacy still encompasses a vast range of human fears, ambitions, and desires. Janicethe eponymous homely girlhas hated her face ever since she was a child and her mother held up Ivory Snow advertisements to her, saying, "Now that is beauty." Homely she is, but also fiercely herself. Still, it is not until she falls in love with a...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream

Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity--and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and...

A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community

The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft--and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.

First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witch-hunting, The Crucible...

Often called the most autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, After the Fall probes deeply into the psyche of Quentin, a man who ruthlessly revisits his past to explain the catastrophe that is his life. His journey backward takes him through a troubled upbringing, the bitter death of his mother, and a series of failed relationships.

In Vichy France in 1942, eight men and a boy are seized by the collaborationist authorities and made to wait in a building that may be a police station. Some of them are Jews. All of them have something to hideif not from the Nazis, then from their fellow detainees and, inevitably, from themselves. For in this claustrophobic antechamber to the death camps, everyone is guilty. And perhaps none more so than those who can walk away alive.

In Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller re-creates Dante's hell inside the gaping pit that is our history and populates it with sinners whose crimes are...

Now a Broadway play starring Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, Danny DeVito, and Jessica Hecht, Miller's riveting story about family, sacrifice, and the struggle to make peace with the past.
Years after an angry breakup, Victor and Walter Franz are reunited by the death of their father. As they sort through his possessions in an old brownstone attic, the memories evoked by his belongings stir up old hostilities. The Price was nominated for two Tony Awards, including best play.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream

Since it was first performed in 1949, Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the tragic shortcomings of an American dreamer has been recognized as a milestone of the theater. Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, has spent his life following the American way, living out his belief in salesmanship as a way to reinvent himself. But somehow the riches and respect he covets have eluded him. At age 63, he searches for the moment his life took a wrong turn, the moment of betrayal...

Joe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop during World War II, turned out defective airplane parts, causing the deaths of many men. Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went back to business, making himself very wealthy in the ensuing years. In Miller's work of tremendous power, a love affair between Keller's son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Steve's daughter, the bitterness of George Keller, who returns from the war to find his father in prison and his father's partner free, and the reaction of a son to his father's guilt escalate toward a climax of...

For some fifty years now, Arthur Miller has been not only America's premier playwright, but also one of our foremost public intellectuals and cultural critics. Echoes Down the Corridor gathers together a dazzling array of more than forty previously uncollected essays and works of reportage. Here is Arthur Miller, the brilliant social and political commentator-but here, too, Miller the private man behind the internationally renowned public figure.Witty and wise, rich in artistry and insight, Echoes Down the Corridor reaffirms Arthur Miller's standing as one of the greatest...

Written in 1945, Focus was Arthur Miller's first novel and one of the first books to directly confront American anti-Semitism. It remains as chilling and incisive today as it was at the time of its controversial debut. As World War II draws to a close, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Brooklyn, New York. Here, Newman, an American of English descent, floats through a world of multiethnic neighborhoods indifferent to the racism around him. That is, until he begins to wear glasses that render him "Jewish" in the eyes of others, making him the target of anti-Semitic prosecution. As he...