All My Sons Summary

Joe and Kate Keller had two sons, Chris and Larry. Keller owned a manufacturing plant with Steve Deever, and their families were close. Steve's daughter Ann was Larry's beau, and George was their friend. When the war came, both Keller boys and George were drafted.

During the war, Keller's and Deever's manufacturing plant had a very profitable contract with the U.S. Army, supplying airplane parts. One morning, a shipment of defective parts came in. Under pressure from the army to keep up the output, Steve Deever called Keller, who had not yet come into work that morning, to ask what he should do. Keller told Steve to weld the cracks in the airplane parts and ship them out. Steve was nervous about doing this alone, but Keller said that he had the flu and could not go into work. Steve shipped out the defective but possibly safe parts on his own.

Later, it was discovered that the defective parts caused twenty-one planes to crash and their pilots to die. Steve and Keller were arrested and convicted, but Keller managed to win an appeal and get his conviction overturned. He claimed that Steve did not call him and that he was completely unaware of the shipment. Keller went home free, while Steve remained in jail, shunned by his family.

Meanwhile, overseas, Larry received word about the first conviction. Racked with shame and grief, he wrote a letter to Ann telling her that she must not wait for him. Larry then went out to fly a mission, during which he broke out of formation and crashed his plane, killing himself. Larry was reported missing.

Three years later, the action of the play begins. Chris has invited Ann to the Keller house because he intends to propose to her--they have renewed their contact in the last few years while she has been living in New York. They must be careful, however, since Mother insists that Larry is still alive somewhere. Her belief is reinforced by the fact that Larry's memorial tree blew down in a storm that morning, which she sees as a positive sign. Her superstition has also led her to ask the neighbor to make a horoscope for Larry in order to determine whether the day he disappeared was an astrologically favorable day. Everyone else has accepted that Larry is not coming home, and Chris and Keller argue that Mother should learn to forget her other son. Mother demands that Keller in particular should believe that Larry is alive, because if he is not, then their son's blood is on Keller's hands.

Ann's brother George arrives to stop the wedding. He had gone to visit Steve in jail to tell him that his daughter was getting married, and then he left newly convinced that his father was innocent. He accuses Keller, who disarms George by being friendly and confident. George is reassured until Mother accidentally says that Keller has not been sick in fifteen years. Keller tries to cover her slip of the tongue by adding the exception of his flu during the war, but it is now too late. George is again convinced of Keller's guilt, but Chris tells him to leave the house.

Chris's confidence in his father's innocence is shaken, however, and in a confrontation with his parents, he is told by Mother that he must believe that Larry is alive. If Larry is dead, Mother claims, then it means that Keller killed him by shipping out those defective parts. Chris shouts angrily at his father, accusing him of being inhuman and a murderer, and he wonders aloud what he must do in response to this unpleasant new information about his family history.

Chris is disillusioned and devastated, and he runs off to be angry at his father in privacy. Mother tells Keller that he ought to volunteer to go to jail--if Chris wants him to. She also talks to Ann and continues insisting that Larry is alive. Ann is forced to show Mother the letter that Larry wrote to her before he died, which was essentially a suicide note. The note basically confirms Mother's belief that if Larry is dead, then Keller is responsible--not because Larry's plane had the defective parts, but because Larry killed himself in response to the family responsibility and shame due to the defective parts.

Mother begs Ann not to show the letter to her husband and son, but Ann does not comply. Chris returns and says that he is not going to send his father to jail, because that would accomplish nothing and his family practicality has finally overcome his idealism. He also says that he is going to leave and that Ann will not be going with him, because he fears that she will forever wordlessly ask him to turn his father in to the authorities.

Keller enters, and Mother is unable to prevent Chris from reading Larry's letter aloud. Keller now finally understands that in the eyes of Larry and in a symbolic moral sense, all the dead pilots were his sons. He says that he is going into the house to get a jacket, and then he will drive to the jail and turn himself in. But a moment later, a gunshot is heard--Keller has killed himself.

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller was one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century. He was born in October 1915 in New York City to a women's clothing manufacturer, who lost everything in the economic collapse of the 1930s. Living through young adulthood during the Great Depression, Miller was shaped by the poverty that surrounded him. The Depression demonstrated to the playwright the fragility and vulnerability of human existence in the modern era. After graduating from high school, Miller worked in a warehouse so that he could earn enough money to attend the University of Michigan, where he began to write plays.
Miller's first play to make it to Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a dismal failure, closing after only four performances. This early setback almost discouraged Miller from writing completely, but he gave himself one more try. Three years later, All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of 1947, launching Miller into theatrical stardom. All My Sons, a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials, was strongly influenced by the naturalist drama of Henrik Ibsen. Along with Death of a Salesman (his most enduring success), All My Sons and The Man Who Had All the Luck form a thematic trilogy of plays about love triangles involving fathers and sons. The drama of the family is at the core of all of Miller's major plays, but nowhere is it more prominent than in the realism of All My Sons and the impressionism of Death of a Salesman.
Death of a Salesman (1949) secured Miller's reputation as one of the nation's foremost playwrights. Death of a Salesman mixes the tradition of social realism that informs most of Miller's work with a more experimental structure that includes fluid leaps in time as the protagonist, Willy Loman, drifts into memories of his sons as teenagers. Loman represents an American archetype, a victim of his own delusions of grandeur and obsession with success, which haunt him with a sense of failure.Miller's first play to make it to Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a dismal failure, closing after only four performances. This early setback almost discouraged Miller from writing completely, but he gave himself one more try. Three years later, All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of 1947, launching Miller into theatrical stardom. All My Sons, a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials, was strongly influenced by the naturalist drama of Henrik Ibsen. Along with Death of a Salesman (his most enduring success), All My Sons and The Man Who Had All the Luck form a thematic trilogy of plays about love triangles involving fathers and sons. The drama of the family is at the core of all of Miller's major plays, but nowhere is it more prominent than in the realism of All My Sons and the impressionism of Death of a Salesman.
Miller won a Tony Award for Death of a Salesman as well as a Pulitzer Prize. The play has been frequently revived in film, television, and stage versions that have included actors such as Dustin Hoffman, George C. Scott and, most recently, Brian Dennehy in the part of Willy Loman.
Miller followed Death of a Salesman with his most politically significant work, The Crucible (1953), a tale of the Salem witch trials that contains obvious analogies to the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings in 1950s America. The highly controversial nature of the politics of The Crucible, which lauds those who refuse to name names, led to the play's mixed response. In later years, however, it has become one of the most studied and performed plays of American theater.
Three years after The Crucible, in 1956, Miller found himself persecuted by the very force that he warned against, when he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller refused to name people he allegedly saw at a Communist writers' meeting a decade before, and he was convicted of contempt. He later won an appeal.
Also in 1956, Miller married actress Marilyn Monroe. The two divorced in 1961, one year before her death. That year Monroe appeared in her last film, The Misfits, which is based on an original screenplay by Miller. After divorcing Monroe, Miller wed Ingeborg Morath, to whom he remained married until his death in 2005. The pair had a son and a daughter.
Miller also wrote the plays A Memory of Two Mondays and the short A View from the Bridge, which were both staged in 1955. His other works include After the Fall (1964), a thinly veiled account of his marriage to Monroe, as well as The Price (1967), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), and The American Clock (1980). His most recent works include the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), and Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play.
Although Miller did not write frequently for film, he did pen an adaptation for the 1996 film version of The Crucible starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination. Miller's daughter Rebecca married Day-Lewis in 1996.

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian:  1828 –1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre.^[1] His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder.
Several of his plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was required to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.^[2]Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition.^[3] Richard Hornby describes him as "a profound poetic dramatist—the best since Shakespeare".^[4] He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, and Eugene O'Neill. Many critics consider him the greatest playwright since Shakespeare.^[3]Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway)^[5] and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen
. Family and youthIbsen was born to Knud Ibsen (1797–1877) and Marichen Altenburg (1799–1869), a well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien in Telemark county, a city which was noted for shipping timber. As he wrote in an 1882 letter to critic and scholar Georg Brandes, "my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien", explaining that he was closely related with "His father's financial ruin would have a strong influence on Ibsen's later work; the characters in his plays often mirror his parents, and his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society. Ibsen would both model and name characters in his plays after his own family. A central theme in Ibsen's plays is the "unremitting portrayals of suffering women," ……………………………………………………………..                                                 At fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. His first play, the tragedy Catiline (1850), was published under the pseudonym "Brynjolf Bjarme", when he was only 20, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful

Life and writingsHe spent the next several years employed at Det norske Theater (Bergen), where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period, he published five new, though largely unremarkable, plays. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.His next play, Brand (1865), brought him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as did the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs.With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas". His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.^{[citation needed]}Ibsen photographed in Dresden ca. 1870Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. . Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and published A Doll's House in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen's society.Ghosts followed in 1881, another scathing commentary on the morality of Ibsen's society, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration.^]In An Enemy of the People (1882). In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike.The Wild Duck (1884) is by many considered Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play, the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.^{[citation needed]}Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. He had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates him in his early autobiographical novel "Stephen Hero". Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism notonly in the theater, but across public life.^{[citation needed]}………………………
legacyOn the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death in 2006, the Norwegian government organised the Ibsen Year,.
HonoursIbsen received many honours during his life and after, such as the Knights Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav.In 1995, the asteroid (5696) Ibsen was named in his memory.                                          

Look Back in Anger AS a well-made play

well-made play: A play that is logically and tighty constructed . At the climax and denouement , all the details of the skillfully contrived plot fall neatly into place . the well-made play is a style of dramatic writing characterized by a meticulous, methodological purposiveness of plotting. The logically precise construction of the well-made play is typified by a number of conventions. The plot is most often based on a withheld secret—known to the audience but unknown to the characters—which, when revealed at the climax, reverses the fortunes of the play's hero.

Look Back in Anger is a well-made play, with all its climaxes, its tightenings and slackenings of tension in the right places. Another critic rightly calls it a traditional play as regards its construction, with its division into three Acts. The play follows the traditional pattern of the well-made play: exposition, climax or complication or denouncement, final resolution of the action. 
Exposition, climax or complication or denouncement are the principal features of a successful and effective play, and all these features are to be found in this well-made play also. The action of the play develops in a logical and coherent manner. In Act I we are introduced to the hero, Jimmy Porter, who is a man at odds with his wife, with his wife’s family, with his friend, and with the world at large too.


The tension in the play begins in the very first Act when Jimmy begins to criticize everything and everybody, particularly his wife Alison. This tension deepens in Act II when Jimmy finds himself compelled to accept Helena as a guest in the house, in spite of the fact that he looks upon Helena as his “natural enemy”. The verbal skirmishes between Jimmy and Helena add to the tension and the conflict becomes very dramatic here. Alison’s refusal to go with Jimmy to London is another aspect of the dramatic conflict in the play. Thereafter Alison’s departure from her husband’s home marks one of the climaxes in the play. Helena’s kissing Jimmy all of a sudden, after the way she has openly been expressing her strong dislike for him, comes as a very big surprise to us.

 In Act III, which is comparatively free from conflict and tension, and where we find Jimmy almost in a relaxed mood acting a comic part, with Cliff joining in the fun, another big surprise comes at the end of Scene I when Alison suddenly returns. Scene II of Act III is again highly dramatic and full of surprises. It is a highly dramatic scene firstly because Helena suddenly announces her decision to leave Jimmy, secondly because we find that Alison has had a miscarriage, and thirdly because the kind of dialogue which Alison and Jimmy now have and which leads to their reconciliation. Helena’s departure is an even bigger surprise than her having suddenly kissed Jimmy at the end of Act II was. The reconciliation between husband and wife is a surprise also in view of the circumstances under which Alison had left Jimmy. In short, it is a gripping play by virtue of its dramatic situations and its unexpected turns of plot.

The tension in the play begins in the very first Act when Jimmy begins to criticize everything and everybody, particularly his wife Alison. This tension deepens in Act II when Jimmy finds himself compelled to accept Helena as a guest in the house, in spite of the fact that he looks upon Helena as his “natural enemy”. The verbal skirmishes between Jimmy and Helena add to the tension and the conflict becomes very dramatic here. Alison’s refusal to go with Jimmy to London is another aspect of the dramatic conflict in the play. Thereafter Alison’s departure from her husband’s home marks one of the climaxes in the play. Helena’s kissing Jimmy all of a sudden, after the way she has openly been expressing her strong dislike for him, comes as a very big surprise to us.

 In Act III, which is comparatively free from conflict and tension, and where we find Jimmy almost in a relaxed mood acting a comic part, with Cliff joining in the fun, another big surprise comes at the end of Scene I when Alison suddenly returns. Scene II of Act III is again highly dramatic and full of surprises. It is a highly dramatic scene firstly because Helena suddenly announces her decision to leave Jimmy, secondly because we find that Alison has had a miscarriage, and thirdly because the kind of dialogue which Alison and Jimmy now have and which leads to their reconciliation. Helena’s departure is an even bigger surprise than her having suddenly kissed Jimmy at the end of Act II was. The reconciliation between husband and wife is a surprise also in view of the circumstances under which Alison had left Jimmy. In short, it is a gripping play by virtue of its dramatic situations and its unexpected turns of plot.
The tension in the play begins in the very first Act when Jimmy begins to criticize everything and everybody, particularly his wife Alison. This tension deepens in Act II when Jimmy finds himself compelled to accept Helena as a guest in the house, in spite of the fact that he looks upon Helena as his “natural enemy”. The verbal skirmishes between Jimmy and Helena add to the tension and the conflict becomes very dramatic here. Alison’s refusal to go with Jimmy to London is another aspect of the dramatic conflict in the play. Thereafter Alison’s departure from her husband’s home marks one of the climaxes in the play. Helena’s kissing Jimmy all of a sudden, after the way she has openly been expressing her strong dislike for him, comes as a very big surprise to us.
 In Act III, which is comparatively free from conflict and tension, and where we find Jimmy almost in a relaxed mood acting a comic part, with Cliff joining in the fun, another big surprise comes at the end of Scene I when Alison suddenly returns. Scene II of Act III is again highly dramatic and full of surprises. It is a highly dramatic scene firstly because Helena suddenly announces her decision to leave Jimmy, secondly because we find that Alison has had a miscarriage, and thirdly because the kind of dialogue which Alison and Jimmy now have and which leads to their reconciliation. Helena’s departure is an even bigger surprise than her having suddenly kissed Jimmy at the end of Act II was. The reconciliation between husband and wife is a surprise also in view of the circumstances under which Alison had left Jimmy. In short, it is a gripping play by virtue of its dramatic situations and its unexpected turns of plot.

A DOLL'S HOUSE AND NATURALISM

Characters in the play ha demonstrated a naturalism focus in the Time of the A Doll’s House. Naturalism in play is a literary movement that involves environments, heredity and social conditions in determining the human character. In the novels, the characters are incapable of determining the outcome of their own lives because it is predestined by what they inherit from both experiences and ancestors in their lives. Due to the circumstances of their lives being undetermined, they have struggles throughout their life and relationships trying to find their identity.
One of the important focus points on naturalism in A Doll’s House is the heredity and social conditions in shaping the character individually.. An example of inheritance is when Nora was done with a conversation about Krogstad’s behavior. Nora did not want her dishonest behavior to contaminate her kids morally. How ever, she struggles with the responsibility for herself and for others through dishonesty. As a wife, Nora felt it was her duty to help save the man (Torvald) she loved, even though she did it in a dishonest manor. At the end of Act three, Nora discovers Torvald always established her identity and comes to the realization that her life has been a lie. Nora says to Torvald in Act three “but our home’s been nothing but a play pen. I’ve been your doll-wife here, as at home I was papa’s doll-child. And in turn the children have been my dolls”. This passage shows signs of both naturalism and the struggle for identity in Nora’s life. From a naturalism focus, Nora starts to comprehend how the social conditions in her past and current household are affecting both her marriage to Torvald and her family.
Slowly Nora's character is forced to discontinue her inauthentic role of a doll and seek out her individuality, her new authentic identity. She comes to realize that her whole life has been a lie. She lived her life pretending to be the old Nora, and hid the changed woman she had become. The illusion of the old Nora continues well after she becomes a new person. When she realizes that responsibilities for herself are more important, Nora slams the door on not just Torvald but on everything that happened in her past. It took time to evolve into a new person, but after she did she became a person who could not stand to be oppressed by Torvald any longer. Ibsen uses the idea of a "doll" because a doll always maintains the same look, no matter what the situation. A doll must do whatever the controller has them do. Dolls are silent and never express opinions or actually accomplish anything without the aid of others. This doll is Nora's inauthentic identity.In this play Ibsen tackles women's rights as a matter of importance. Throughout this time period it was neglected. Ibsen acknowledges the fact that in 19th century life the role of the woman was to stay at home, raise the children and attend to her husband. Nora is the character in A Doll House who plays the  19th woman and is portrayed as a victim.
Ibsen in his "A Doll's House" depicts the role of women as subordinate in order to emphasize their role in society. Nora is oppressed by the manipulation from Torvald. Torvald has a very typical relationship with society. He is a smug bank manager. With his job arrive many responsibilities. He often treats his wife as if she is one of these responsibilities. Torvald is very authoritative and puts his appearance, both social and physical, ahead of his wife that he supposedly loves. Torvald is a man that is worried about his reputation, and cares little about his wife's feelings. 
Nora and Torvald's relationship, on the outside appears to be a happy. Nora is treated like a child in this relationship, but as the play progresses she begins to realize how phony her marriage is. Torvald sees Nora's only role as being the subservient and loving wife. He refers to Nora as "my little squirrel" , "my little lark". To him, she is only a possession. Torvald calls Nora by pet-names and speaks down to her because he thinks that she is not intelligent and that she can not think on her own. Whenever she begins to voice an opinion Torvald quickly drops the pet-names and insults her as a women .Torvald is a typical husband in his society. He denied Nora the right to think and act the way she wished. He required her to act like an imbecile and insisted upon the rightness of his view in all matter. This conflict often results in his characters' being divided between a sense of duty to themselves and their responsibility to others." is applicable to Nora in A Doll House. Nora Helmer is a character struggling to realize her authentic identity. Her husband Torvald has always established her identity. Throughout the play Torvald was condescending towards Nora and forced her to act and look in a way that pleased him. Nora allowed Torvald to play dress up with her and no matter what the situation Nora has to consistently remain Torvald's quiet, happy, little doll. Nora ends her doll life by leaving her doll house to learn and explore on her own. She is no longer a doll under the control of her master.