1 - Introduction

Summary

Introduction to the first edition

The plays are my autobiography. I can’t write plays that don’t sum up where I am. I’m in all of them. I don’t know how else to go about writing.

Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, on 17 October 1915, a long way from the Connecticut hills where he has lived for nearly half a century, though not quite as far as it may seem. Harlem, then, was an elegant and mixed neighborhood, partly German, partly Italian, Jewish, and black. There was open space. His mother could watch him walk to a school which she herself had attended, down unthreatening streets.

The family was wealthy. His father, an all but illiterate immigrant from Poland, had built up a clothing business which employed a thousand workers. That all ended with the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The houses grew smaller, family life more tense. They moved to Brooklyn. At thirteen he wanted to be a soldier and go to West Point. Three years later, with the Depression biting hard, he “wanted to be anything that was going.” The “anything” extended to being a crooner. For a brief while he had a radio programme of his own: “I sang the latest hits and had a blind pianist with lots of dandruff.”