English: All My Sons

In Joe and Kate Keller’s family garden, an apple tree—a memorial to their son Larry, lost in the Second World War—has been torn down by a storm. But his loss is not
the only part of the family’s past they can’t put behind them. Not everybody’s forgotten the court case that put Joe’s partner in jail, or the cracked engine heads his factory produced which caused it and dropped twenty-one pilots out of the sky…

All My Sons is a moving, powerful drama of the ethics of profiteering and family, and the first great play from one of the finest playwrights of the twentieth century.

It is difficult to underestimate the importance of the Great Depression and of the Second World War on the work of Arthur Miller and his contemporaries. Even when Miller’s plays don’t specifically focus on the political woes of his age (the time immediately following World War II), they are infused with the political realities, the complexities of American power, which dominated popular discussion at the time.
The Second World War elevated the US out of a crippling and decade-long financial depression; it put millions back to work; and it mobilized American production in the service of a clear and, for many, indomitable cause: the march of democracy against Fascism, as represented by the governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan. After the conclusion of the war, however, American GIs returned home, became educated, started families, and found themselves confronting a moral universe that was no longer so simple, so black-and-white, as that of the war in which they had been fighting. Miller concerned himself with the mind-set of the American family-man and -woman: those whose job was to provide, materially, for their families, but who often found that life was more difficult than the mere accumulation of wealth. All My Sons, like many of Miller’s plays, is an attempt to sift through the values common to American families after the Second World War, in order to determine what “the good life” truly meant in an age of rising economic circumstances.

American dramatist Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915. In 1938 Miller won awards for his comedy The Grass Still Grows. His major achievement was Death of a Salesman, which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for drama and the 1949 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The Crucible was aimed at the widespread congressional investigation of subversive activities in the US; the drama won the 1953 Tony Award. Miller’s autobiography, Timebends: A Life was published in 1987.