A critical study of the works of Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller (1915 -2005) is considered one of the foremost American playwrights of the twentieth century who wrote a remarkable series of highly regarded pieces that reveal profound insight, humanism and empathy that are the hallmarks of his great dramatic works. Although quite voluminous, the critical work on Arthur Miller over the last seventy years turns out, on close reading, a set of repetitions in different vocabularies. The plays of Arthur Miller have an organic unity. Each play grows out of earlier ones or to return to familiar themes. Collectively his plays reveal his efforts to confront and find some intelligible meaning to the world witnessed by him. If this attempt has sometimes led to disillusionment, it has never led to defeat. It ought to be emphasized that Arthur Miller is fully aware of the three distinct and characteristic elements of excellence, the presence of which can be discerned in varying degrees in his plays. They are matter of presentment, manner of presentment and the capacity to promote aesthetic bliss. In the plays of Arthur Miller there is the fusion of the subjective and objective aspects of reality. At one level he concerns himself with the objective point of view and reproduces the elements of reality without his mind transference on to the reality that he witnesses. He adroitly marries the past with the present. His literary products are edifices whose every corner deserves the closest attention, and such an examination is invariably a rewarding experience. Thus, it is conclusively established that Arthur Miller is a creative writer, and his plays, particularly All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, have lasting value and they lend themselves to inexhaustible study.