The Crucible in History and Other Essays

In this book of three essays, Arthur Miller looks back some fifty years to expose the post-war political climate of suspicion and paranoia that led to his writing The Crucible, still his most performed play

With the same penetrating candour that he brought to his autobiography Timebends, Miller reveals intimate details of the personal peril and despair he endured in the early 1950s, when America was in the grip of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade

The Crucible became his cri de coeur against the destruction of lives and reputations in an America in which trust and innocence were sacrificed to mass political hysteria and right-wing agendas

In two other essays included here, he reflects on Death of a Salesman on the 50th anniversary of its first production and also on The Price