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.