Arthur Miller is one of those playwrights, like Thornton Wilder, whose reputation rests on a handful of plays. The quality of that reputation changes from year to year, from critic to critic, but now, five years after the production of his most recent play (the revision of A View from the Bridge), it is generally conceded—even by those who persist in not admiring his work—that Miller is one of the two playwrights of the postwar American theatre who deserve any consideration as major dramatists. Tennessee Williams is the other.

There are many ways of approaching Miller's work. In the late Forties, after All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, popular reviewers tended to embrace him enthusiastically while consciously intellectual critics, displaying the carefulness of their kind, hoped that in explaining him they might explain him away.