Arthur Miller Influence On The Crucible

Arthur Miller was born on October 17th, 1915 in New York City and died February 10, 2005, in Roxbury, Connecticut. When he was young his family owned a women’s clothing store, however, they had lost it during the Great Depression which forced them to move into a smaller home in Brooklyn. The depression largely influenced Miller’s ideas and how he saw life, also looking to the Greeks for inspiration when writing, he had a tendency to revolve his characters around a power, “personal responsibility”, and the “twin poles of guilt and hope” (“Arthur Miller”). Meanwhile, Miller worked many jobs during the depression to earn money for college, he attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied English and used his various scholarships

Arthur Miller’s exposure of psychological and social issues is seen through his various recurring themes in many of his plays. Some of the themes that Miller uses in his writing can be linked back to events that occurred in his life. For example, in The Crucible majority of the people are accused of being witches because others want wealth and power. Tragedies generally show the sort of impulses, connected to current and past social issues, that drive people. The Crucible reflects social issues such as corruption, greed, or excessive desire for power (Miller). One of the most significant social issues Arthur Miller addressed in his novel Focus, was that of class and racial division. This was important to Miller due to the hardships he and his family endured, because parents were Jewish immigrants, therefore, they often “faced prejudice, especially during periods of economic hardship or war. During World War I and the Great Depression, Jews were often targeted as scapegoats”

At the time, McCarthy was a first-term senator from Wisconsin who had won election in 1946 after a campaign in which he criticized his opponent’s failure to enlist during World War II while emphasizing his own wartime heroics. There were fears of a nuclear holocaust based on the knowledge that the Soviet Union exploded its first A-bomb in 1949. That same year, China, the world 's most populous nation, became communist. Half of Europe was under Joseph Stalin 's influence, and every time Americans read their newspapers, there seemed to be a new threat. All of these factors combined to create an fearful and dreadful atmosphere, which provided a ripe environment for the rise of committed anti communist, Joseph McCarthy, who for many Americans was “the most enduring symbol of this ‘Red Scare’”(“Joseph R.”). “McCarthy 's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact”, he spent almost five years trying in vain to expose communists and other “loyalty risks” in the U.S. government, suggestion of disloyalty was enough to convince many Americans of the traitors and spies in their government. (“Joseph R.”). Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to national