Arthur Miller

"Arthur Miller is a well renowned play write. He wrote many plays, his best being Death of a Salesman. It ""stunned audiences with its brilliance and was quickly earmarked as a classic of the modern theatre""(imagi-nation.com). In 1943 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman. ""He has come to be considered one of the greatest dramatists in the history of the American Theater, and his plays, a fusion of the naturalistic and expressionistic techniques, continue to be widely produced""(imagi-nation.com). Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory for the McCarthy era and the Salem Witch trial hysteria and uses motifs in Death of a Salesman to point to an underlying ideas as well as verbal and symbolic technique help back these ideas. Miller was denied a passport to see the premeir of The Crucible and was under scrutiny with Congress because on an ongoing investigation of Communism in the arts. Miller was married to Actress Marylin Monroe for 5 years and in the 1950's he began writing screen plays one of which he wrote a part in for Marylin. During the filming of Misfits Monroe was heavely using drugs and their marriage begain to crumble. They were divorced in 1961.

McCarthyism took place throughout the 1940's and 1950's during the threat of Communism. Senator Joseph McCarthy made an accusation that there were hundreds of Communists that had infiltrated into the United States. This theory of his was later proven to be untrue, but his zealous campaigning style ushered one of the most repressive times in the 20th century American Politics. McCarthyism is known as the paranoid hunt for infiltrators and was especially hard on writers of this time because some were accused of being communist sympathizers and were unable to write and had their passports taken away. (American Masters). "