Arthur Miller

            Arthur Miller, winner of many literary and dramatic awards, is an incredibly influential force in American drama. His plays deal with issues common to every society. He makes the audience face fault, weakness, and ignorance; subjects we would typical hide from. At the same time he emphasizes strength, human spirit, and familial love. Alice Griffin believes that Miller's plays are important internationally (xii). He belongs to an international theater rather than a regional theater (Heilman 170). His plays are staged and studied by students to understand American life in Russia, P and, Iceland, Brazil, Italy, France, Germany, Czech Republic, and China to name a few (Griffin xi). Miller's works thrived in England. The University of East Angelia named it's center the Arthur Miller Centre (Griffin 1). They can relate to the sense f identity, honor, recognition, and familial love (Griffin Preface). In a production in Beijing, Miller explained to a Chinese actor playing Biff the son's feelings of guilt and painfully requited love for his father, the actor understood as it is v y Chinese (Morath 79). The phenomenon of Death of a Salesman has been the same all over the world. Audiences all have a sense of their life story of their father, uncle, or brother (Griffin 35). In real life Miller had an Uncle Manny who had two sons ho were in competition with Miller and his brother. Manny ended his own life because he failed at business. Miller's personal history is demonstrated in his sensitive and passionate writing in Death of a Salesman (Griffin 41). The Crucible (1952) was originally intended to be called Those Familiar Spirits, referring to a spirit that a witch presumably sends out to torment her victims. However, the well area at the bottom of a blast furnace is known as the crucible, it is whe the molten steels collects being entirely broken down due to immense heat. Miller thought that this was a precise metaphor for what happened in Salem.