“For me! I was dying everyday and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the god dam business?..........”

 All My Sons, Arthur Miller’s first commercially successful play, opened at the Coronet Theatre in New York on January 29, 1947. It ran for 328 performances and garnered important critical acclaim for the dramatist, winning the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Miller’s earlier play,

The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), had not done well and had quickly closed; therefore, at the time All My Sons opened, Miller’s reputation as a writer was based almost solely on Focus (1945), his lauded novel about anti-Semitism. All My Sons is now regarded as the first of Miller’s major plays.

The work also greatly helped the career of Elia Kazan, who had first won accolades for his direction of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942 and after directing All My Sons would continue to work with the plays of both Miller and Tennessee Williams to produce both legendary stage productions and important films.

Most of the reviews appearing in the major newspapers and magazines on All My Sons vividly depicts the psychological aspects of the United States during and immediately after the Second World War in a realistic setting. In fact, it is impossible to understand the problems Joe and Chris Keller, the father and the son, get involved in without the background of the war.

The moral or ethical issue the play presents through the conflict between Joe, a practical-minded realist and Chris, a militant idealist, or even Larry, another son not appearing on the stage, becomes apparent with the very background of the war, per se. Chris: Everything was being destroyed, se but it seemed to me that one new thing was made. A kind of… responsibility.

Man for man. Do you understand me? – To show that, to bring that on to the earth again like some kind of monument and everyone would feel it standing there, behind him, and it would make a difference to him. Before Chris can give himself fully to Ann, he needs her to understand the conflict he feels between the idealism of the war and the practicality of daily life back home.

Subcribe on Youtube - IGNOU SERVICE

For PDF copy of Solved Assignment

WhatsApp Us - 9113311883(Paid)