American Dramatist

“When the twentieth century is history and American drama viewed in perspective, the plays of Arthur Miller will undoubtedly be preserved in the annals of dramatic literature.” Miller’s eminence as a dramatist is primarily based on four plays he wrote in early in his career. The four plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). Insisting that the individual is doomed to frustration when he …

…talent is for a kind of humanistic jusprudence. He sticks to the facts of the case. His play for this reason as clearer than of those other American playwrights with the similar insight whose lyric gifts tend to reflect the more elusive and imponderable aspects of the same situation. There is sense poetry in Death of a Salesman – not the poetry of the senses or soul, but of the ethical conscience (World Literature Criticism page 2363).