1692 Salem Witch Trials

1. 1692 Salem Witch Trials This is the basis for Arthur Miller’s screenplay, The Crucible. Who was executed, why?

2. Born in New York in the family of Isidore, a moderately rich jewish ladies wear manufacturer and shopkeeer, and Augusta Miller; His family was ruined in the Great Depression and he had to work in automobile parts warehouse to earn money for college; Studied journalism, but graduated in English from the University of Michigan. His decision to become a writer was under the impression of Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov; Married his college sweetheart Mary Slattery. Arthur Miller

3. Works • The Man Who Had All the Luck – his first play (1944); • All My Sons (1947) – NY Drama Critics Circle award and two Tony awards; • The Story of Gi Joe (1945); • Focus (1945) – his first Novel; • Death of a Salesman (1949) – Miller’s plays often depict how families are destroyed by false values; • The Crucible (1953).

4. Some Other Facts • Wrote two short plays under the collective title of A View From The Bridge(1954); • Married Marilyn Monroe (1956), wrote screenplays (Misfits) with roles for his wife, and divorced her (1961); • 1965 – Miller was elected president of P.E.N, the international literary organization • 1968 – At the democratic Party Convention he was elected delegate for Eugene McCarthy, whose era of mass hysteria as depicted in Miller’s The Crucible, where “accepted the notion that conscience was no longer a private matter but one of state administration”; • Numerou problems with the House of Un-American Activities Committee for being a “romantic marxist”; • After the Fall – a biographical play • Finishing the Picture – last play, depicted the making of Misfits.

5. Why was The Crucible written? The Crucible was written by Arthur Miller in 1953 as an allegory for McCarthyism or the so called (second) Red Scare. Miller felt many personal convictions to McCarthyism as a result of a multitude of events that happened in his life. Wanting to point out to the world the amazing parallel between the unjust Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and the (second) Red Scare from 1948 to 1956, Miller wrote The Crucible to make a powerful statement about the dangers of hysteria and the dehumanization that can result. Note: The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1917 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare was focused on (national and foreign) communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both.

6. Did you know? Miller was married to legendary actress.... Marilyn Monroe

7. During McCarthyism, the United States was terrified of Communism's influence. Like the witches, communists were seen ingrained within every aspect of society. Miller was sent to jail for withholding information from the court, namely the names of those assumed to be communists. Many of Miller’s peers fearing the wrath of the court provided names of suspected communists in an attempt to save themselves.

8. “McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact.” -Arthur Miller “McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had "lost China" and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.” -Arthur Miller Miller Speaks Source:http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/amiller.htm http://wikipedia.com