The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts.

MILLER, Arthur.

$25,000.00

Item Number: 140347

New York: The Viking Press, 1953.

First edition of Miller’s Tony Award-winning play, a bitter satire inspired by the heightened political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals during the McCarthy era. Octavo, original half cloth over patterned boards, top edge red. Association copy, inscribed by Arthur Miller on the front free endpaper to his mother and father, “To Mother & Dad With my love Arthur.” Arthur Miller was the second of three children of Augusta (Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His father was born in Radomyśl Wielki, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Poland), and his mother was a native of New York whose parents had immigrated from the same town. Miller’s father, Isidore, owned a women’s clothing manufacturing business which employed over 400 people and the family lived on West 110th Street in Manhattan, owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Millers lost almost everything and were forced to move to Gravesend, Brooklyn where, as a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help with their finances. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, Miller worked several jobs in order to pay for his college tuition at the University of Michigan where he would major in journalism. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket photograph by Gjon Mili. With a picture of Miller’s parents laid in. From the library of Arthur Miller. An exceptional association copy on this landmark of twentieth century literature.

Written as an allegory for the heightened political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals during the McCarthy era, Miller's 1953 play, The Crucible offers a dramatized and partially fictionalized retelling of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. In 1952, Miller's close personal friend Elia Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and named eight members of the Group Theatre who had recently been fellow members of the Communist Party. Kazan's act outraged Miller and inspired him to travel to Salem to begin work on The Crucible. The play was first performed at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953, starring E. G. Marshall, Beatrice Straight and Madeleine Sherwood to largely hostile reviews but was soon awarded the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. The HUAC took an interest in Miller himself not long after The Crucible opened, and in 1956 summoned him to appear before the committee. During the hearing, Miller refused to comply with the committee's orders to provide the names of colleagues who may have been involved with Communist Party and was found guilty of contempt of Congress, a ruling which was overturned the following year. Though is was only somewhat successful at the time of its release, The Crucible remains Miller's most frequently produced work. In 1996, a film adaptation of The Crucible starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Scofield, Bruce Davison and Winona Ryder was released. Miller spent much of 1996 working on the screenplay and it earned him his only nomination for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.