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Home , Honors at Dawn, No Villain, The Golden Years (play), The Last Yankee

Appendix 1: ’s Contribution

Note: The asterisk-marked plays and one act plays are used as the primary source material for the present research Year Title Form Remark 1933 ‘In Memoriam ’ Short story

1936 No villains Play unpublished 1937 Play unpublished

They Too Arise (A revision o f ) Play unpublished 1938 The Great Disobedience Play unpublished 1939 The Grass still Grows (revision o f No villain) Play unpublished 1940 Play unpublished 1941 i) The Pussycat and the Expert Radio play Plumber Who Was a Man i) William Ireland’s Confession Radio play 1942 The Four Freedoms Radio play 1943 The Half-Bridge Play, unpublished 1944 i) The Story o f G.I.Joe Screen play ii) Situation Normal, Book Hi) The M an w h o H a d A ll the L u ck p la y Play, Unpublished 1945 i) F ocu s Novel ii) Grandpa and the Statue That They May One act play Win 1947 Play * 1949 Death o f a Salesman Play *

1950 An Enemy o f the People An adapted play

1953 Play * 1955 i) A Memory o f Two Mondays One act play ii) (Revised) One act play Hi) A view from the Bridget Revised Play * 1956 (Revised) Play * 1957 Collected Plays V I1 (That contains Sons Plays Salesman, Crucible, A memory, A View). 1958 The Misfit (Film) Different than a conventional form 1964 Play * Play * 1967 I D on’t Need You Any More Short stories

235 1968 The P rice Play * 1969 i) In Russia: Travelogue ii) The Reason Why Film 1970 i) F am e One-act play ii) The Reason why One -act play 1971 The Portable Arthur Miller Plays 1972 Creation o f the World and Other Business Play * 1973 i) One act play ii) The Archbishop’s Ceiling One act play 1974 ( revision of Creation of Musical the World & Other Business 1977 In the Country Travelogue 1978 The Theatre Essays o f Arthur Miller Critical Essays 1979 Chinese Encounters, Travelogue 1980 Playing for Time (adaptation of Fannie Adaptation Fenelion ’s book) 1981 i) Collected Plays Vol. 1I._ (Comprising Misfits Plays Fall, Vichy, Price, Creation, Playing for Time

1982 i) Some Kind o f Love Story One act play ii) Elegy for a Lady One act play Hi) The A m erican C lo ck (R evised) Play * 1984 Salesman in Beijing Travelogue 1985 The Archbishop’s Ceiling (Revised) Play * 1986 i) I can’t Remember Anything One act play * ii) C la ra One act play * 1987 Timebends: A life Autobiography 1990 Everybody Wins Screen play 1991 The Ride Down Mount Morgan Play *

1992 Homely Girl: A life Novella 1993 Play * 1994 Play * 1995 i) Plain Girl Novella ii) The Portable Arthur Miller (comprising- Salesman, Crucible, After the Fall, The Plays American Clock, Yankee, Broken Glass) 1996 The Crucible Film version 2004 Play

236 Appendix 2: Some of Arthur Miller’s autobiographical details

Some of the significant autobiographical details from Miller’s life, which have gone in the making of his dramatic art have been given below. They have certainly helped the researcher to enhance his analysis and understanding of voluntary deaths in Miller’s plays.

Miller's parental background Arthur Miller was bom in October 1915 in Manhattan, and died in February 2005 in America. His mother, Augusta, and father, Isadore were both Jews. Arthur was the second of the three children; Kermit, elder and Joan, younger. Arthur’s mother promoted in him a rich intellectual life and love of literature. His father tried to instill in him an ethical sense of behavior, and social and political responsibility.

Miller's soGio-economic background Arthur Miller was growing up during the Economic Depression of 1930’s which shaped and moulded his sensibilities and developed his humanistic understanding of the insecurity of man in modem industrial and commercial civilization, his deep-rooted belief in the responsibility of man and society towards each other, and his moral earnestness. Arthur graduated (B.A.) from the University of Michigan in 1938. He did a variety of jobs - a truck-diver, waiter, crew-man on a tanker, a dispatch clerk in a warehouse, a ship fitter’s helper, a script-writer of radio plays and a full-fledged playwright, who has been considered as one of the leading playwrights of America.

237 Miller's marital background Arthur married three times: First, in 1940, he married Mary Slatery, a catholic. Their “intermarriage” was not liked by both the families. They had a daughter in 1944, and a son in 1947. They got divorced in 1956. Miller was not happy with the facts that his children were being raised without any sense of their Jewish heritage, and that Mary’s relationship with his mother was becoming more and more strained. In 1956 Miller married , an orphan but a glamorous film star. Marilyn had converted to Judaism in order to marry Miller in a traditional Jewish ceremony. In 1957 she lost her child in an abortion, resulting in a severe depression that lasted until her suicidal death. In January 1962, she applied for a Mexican divorce from Miller and in August she committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. In February 1962, Miller married Ingeborg Morath, an Austrian photographer, whose Catholic parents had converted themselves be Protestant. A daughter was bom to them in 1963. The couple remained together up to his death in a relationship, that was professional as well as marital, in their Connecticut house on the farm land of 350 acres which his playwrighting earned for him some plays of Miller do refer to these autobiographical elements (Schlueter: 1987).

Miller’s concern for justice in real life Justice was a concern not only in his plays but also in his life. In 1956, Miller was summoned to appear before the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to name the writers who were present at the Communist Writers’ Meeting he had attended in New York. He refused to name names. He asserted the precedence of the individual moral conscience over a law of the society and associated his refusal with the right of the writer to take supralegal action where necessary. This belief in the primacy of the individual is seen in its

238 most assertive form in Miller’s characters Johan Proctor Eddie Carbone and Lyman Felt who invite their own deaths by breaking the laws of their societies to affirm their personal sense of justice. In 1968, Miller petitioned the soviet government to lift the ban on the works of Aleksandr Solzhentsyn. In 1971, with Miller’s help, the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal was freed from prison. In 1976, Miller was instrumental in securing the release of a young man who was falsely accused of murdering his mother. The same year he participated in a symposium on Jewish culture in which he asserted that “Jewish writers lived in an apocalyptic context and are all dancing on the edge of a precipice ” (Schlueter: 1987: 33). In 1980, he signed a letter with other American Jews protesting the Israeli (Begin) government’s expansion of settlements on the West Bank.

Miller as a moral conscience “[A]s a Jewish writer he undoubtedly dispensed with saints in favour of a moral conscience, a powerful awareness of irony, and a sense of homour,” (Bigsby: 1995: xi) He is a great exponent of the cult of art for the sake of society. It has been his conviction that his art of playwrighting should help people to change the society for the better. His plays can both speak of socio-economic, psychological, legal, moral conditions of people and analyse and comment on them in most convincing and powerful ways.

Miller and suffering Miller’s grandfather and father migrated to the United States from Austria- Hungary at the turn of the 20th century. Miller’s father was just five or six years old when he came to the U.S. In his autobiography Timebends: A Life, Arthur Miller has given the tragic account of the arrival of his father Isadore Miller in the USA: Miller’s grandfather came to the U.S. to earn money and survive. He did not

239 have money to buy his son’s (Miller’s father’s) ticket. So Miller’s father was left with Miller’s uncle in Poland {Timebends: 9). After some months Miller’s father’s ‘ticket arrived at last, and he was put on a train for the port of Hamburg with a tag around his neck asking that he be delivered if the stranger would be so kind, to a certain ship sailing for New York on a certain date.’ After three weeks the child arrived in New York with his teeth loose and a scab of a silver dollar size on his head. His parents were too busy working to pick him up at Castle Garden and sent his next eldest brother Abe, ten years old, to bring him home. Miller’s father lived a poor childhood [Timebends: 20). Arthur Miller grew up in the company of the grandparents, parents, uncles, cousins, a brother and a sister. When the grown up Miller visited Poland, he realized, {Timebends: 20) “had my grandfathers not decided before the turn of the century that there was no ftiture for them in that country, I would not have survived to the age of thirty. Hardly a Jew was left in that part of Poland once the

Nazi war machine had swept across its flat and dreary landscape.” {Timebends: 20)

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