Only 16 months after the end of the Second World War, Miller was keen to write a play that forced its audience to face the moral complexities of the war and its aftermath. The national mood was poised between feelings of victory and liberation on the one hand and, on the other, uncertainty and paranoia about the future. In a domestic microcosm, the play explores similarly conflicted feelings in the context of conflicted families.
Miller’s idea for the play came from an incident during the war years. In his autobiography, Timebends: A Life, he recalls overhearing a story about ‘a young girl somewhere in central Ohio who had turned her father in to the FBI for having manufactured faulty aircraft parts’. Although an engineer had claimed that the play’s premise was implausible, pointing out that aircraft parts were routinely X-rayed, Miller confirmed that a senate committee had gone on to expose ‘the Wright Aeronautical Corporation of Ohio, which had exchanged the “Condemned” tags on defective engines for “Passed” and, in cahoots with bribed army inspectors, had shipped many hundreds of these failed machines to the armed forces.’
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
