Andrew Norman

During his lifetime, US playwright Arthur Miller was affronted in numerous ways by what he experienced, either personally, or vicariously through the experiences of others. For example: By the way his immigrant family had come to financial grief in the Great Depression (1929 to the late 1930s), through no fault of their own. By the anti-Semitism that existed in the USA and elsewhere in the 1930s, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust in which so many people of his own ethnic group, the Jews, together with millions of other innocents, perished. By the way he and others, including many connected with the arts, were persecuted for alleged communist sympathies in the McCarthy 'witch-hunts' of the late 1940s and 1950s in the USA. By the way that atheism, to which he himself subscribed, was considered to be subversive and unpatriotic. By the way that the 'American Dream' was generally portrayed as something to which everybody could aspire: and yet, by embracing the concept of the American Dream, most people were generally setting themselves up to fail. Despite his disillusionment with life, Miller strove to illuminate a path to a better way and in doing so, offered hope to the inhabitants of the flawed and troubled world in which he found himself, not just in the USA but also elsewhere.

White Owl

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