All My Sons by Arthur Miller

All My Sons was written by Arthur Miller (1915-2005). He wrote this play after the failure of his first play The Man Who Had All the Luck. It was a failure on Broadway because it had only lasted four performances. As a final attempt of writing a successful play, Miller had wrote All My Sons. If this play wasn’t successful, he was going to find some other line of work to do. Miller’s mother-in-law had pointed out a true story in the Ohio newspaper. The story was about a woman who talked about her dad selling faulty parts to the U.S. military in World War II. He became interested in this story. With an influence in Henrik Ibsen’s work, Miller took the idea of two partners in a business where one is forced to take the responsibility for the other partner. This idea is mirrored in All My Sons. With these ideas put together, All My Sons had an immediate success with 328 performances.

All My Sons takes place on a Sunday morning in August and is set in the backyard of the Keller home. It is located in the outskirts of an unidentified American town, a couple of years after the end of World War II. This tells the story of a successful, middle-aged man, named Joe Keller. For once in his life, he has done a terrible and tragic thing. During World War II, while rushing to meet an order for the military, he sold them defective airplane parts which caused the lives of 21 men. This was no accident. He framed his business partner, Dave, for the crime that he committed. He is now running his own job while his partner is paying Joe’s price in prison. The only person in his life that knows about this crime is his wife, Kate. She hasn’t told anybody and doesn’t plan on it either. She feels terrible because she believes that Joe is the cause of Larry’s death. Larry was their first son who had died during WWII. Now, Joe’s son Chris is in the process of marrying Dave’s daughter. Dave’s daughter, Ann, was the former fiancÐ"©e of Larry. Kate totally disagrees with this idea and does whatever she can to stop this from occurring. Events start to change when Chris and other family members find out about Joe’s horrible crime. This leads to a very unsuspecting conclusion. All My Sons is a play about the past. It is based on the decisions that Joe Keller had made back in WWII. But how exactly does the past affect the present and the shape of the future?