The Crucible Study Guide

Arthur Miller was born to middle-class parents in 1915 in New York City. Miller was unintellectual as a boy, but decided to become a writer and attended the University of Michigan to study journalism. There, he received awards for his playwriting. His first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck opened in 1944. Miller had his first real success with All My Sons (1947). Death of a Salesman (1949) made Miller a star. The Crucible opened in 1952, and was considered an attack on the anti-Communist McCarthyism then raging in the United States. Miller himself was brought before Congress in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate. The conviction was eventually overturned.

The Crucible is a fictionalized account of the Salem Witch trials of 1692, in which 19 innocent men and women were killed by hanging and hundreds convicted before the panic subsided. Yet while The Crucible depicts one witch-hunt, it was written during another. In the 1950s, during the first years of the Cold War, a Senator named Joseph McCarthy rose to power by whipping the nation into a terror of Communists. McCarthy led the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which sought to find Communists in America. Those named as Communists were placed on "Blacklists" that prevented them from getting work. Eventually the fervor died down and McCarthy was censured, but not before the lives of hundreds of people, particularly those in entertainment industries, were destroyed.

In its depiction of Puritanism, The Crucible most resembles Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Both works show that not only is Puritanism harsh and strict, but that this harshness makes it blind, cruel, hypocritical, and destructive. Hawthorne was actually a descendant of the notorious Judge Hathorne from the witch trials. Hawthorne added the "w" to his name to distance himself from the judge.