Death of a Salesman – The Crucible – All My Sons – A Memory of Two Mondays – A View from the Bridge

This volume contains four of the most important and famous plays of the American theatre. All five plays were written by Arthur Miller within a ten-year period which began with his first Broadway hit in 1947: ‘With the production of All My Sons, wrote Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, ‘the theatre has acquired a genuine new talent.’ This hit was followed by an even greater play: Death of a Salesman. ‘A great play of our day’, wrote the New York Herald Tribune and the play has gone on to become the classic American tragedy of Willy Loman, a salesman who becomes disillusioned with the American dream. The Crucible (1953) was produced during the McCarthy era and became a parable of the witch-hunting practises of a government rooting out Communists. A View from the Bridge (1955) concerns the lives of longshoremen in the Brooklyn waterfront and has remained one of Miller’s most produced plays. A Memory of Two Mondays, a one-act play, was written as a companion piece to A View from the Bridge.