NOW AVAILABLE An Educator’s Guide to Arthur Miller: Exploring Plays as Authors, Activists, and Artists

By Spenser Stevens | November 15 2023 | GeneralLiteraturePerforming Arts

In the history of postwar American art and politics, Arthur Miller casts a long shadow as a playwright of stunning range and power whose works held up a mirror to America and its shifting values. His characters wrestle with power conflicts, personal and social responsibility, and the repercussions of past actions.

Bringing new life to Miller’s plays for the current generation of students, Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Educational Theatre at The City College of New York and Mentor for the Arthur Miller Foundation Fellows Program Elizabeth Dunn-Ruiz’s educator’s guide is now available online: An Educator’s Guide to Arthur Miller: Exploring Plays as Authors, Activists, and Artists.

“PRH Education’s new guide written by Arthur Miller Foundation Mentor Elizabeth Dunn-Ruiz, who has been an integral part of the AMF Fellows Program since its inception in 2015, is a welcome resource and aligns with the AMF mission to increase equitable access to quality theater education in public schools.” —Jaime Hastings, Executive Director, Arthur Miller Foundation

This resource highlights Miller’s classics including All My Sons, A View from the Bridge, An Enemy of the People, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible.

On the importance of Penguin Classics’ support of the Arthur Miller Foundation, Elda Rotor, Vice President and Publisher of Penguin Classics, states: “This new resource for our wider Penguin Classics community reflects the spirit of partnership PRH and AMF share in support of educators and students, and illuminates how Arthur Miller’s works continue to resonate with and challenge readers to engage with the world as artists, authors, and activists.”

Penguin Random House Education and Penguin Classics are proud to support The Arthur Miller Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide theatre arts education in public schools in New York and Connecticut. Learn about their work supporting teachers and students here.

 

View and download the guide here.

All My Sons
978-0-14-311581-6
An eye-catching new Penguin Plays edition of the work that established Arthur Miller as a leading voice in the American theater
$16.00 US
Jun 14, 2016
Paperback
112 Pages
Penguin Books

A View from the Bridge
978-0-14-048135-8
America's greatest playwright weaves "a vivid, crackling, idiomatic psychosexual horror tale." —Frank Rich, The New York TimesWinner of the 2016 Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Play and Best Direction of a Play: Ivo van Hove.In A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller explores the intersection between one man's self-delusion and the brutal trajectory of fate. Eddie Carbone is a Brooklyn longshoreman, a hard-working man whose life has been soothingly predictable. He hasn't counted on the arrival of two of his wife's relatives, illegal immigrants from Italy; nor has he recognized his true feelings for his beautiful niece, Catherine. And in due course, what Eddie doesn't know—about her, about life, about his own heart—will have devastating consequences. "The play has moments of intense power. . . . Miller plays on the audience with the skill of a master." —Clive Barnes, New York Post
$15.00 US
Jul 28, 1977
Paperback
96 Pages
Penguin Books

An Enemy of the People
978-0-14-048140-2
Dr. Stockmann attempts to expose a water pollution scandal in his home town which is about to establish itself as a spa. When his brother, the mayor, conspires with local politicians and the newspaper to suppress the story, Stockmann appeals to the public meeting—only to be shouted down and reviled as 'an enemy of the people'. Ibsen's explosive play reveals his distrust of politicians and the blindly held prejudices of the 'solid majority'.
$16.00 US
Nov 17, 1977
Paperback
128 Pages
Penguin Books

Death of a Salesman
978-0-14-048134-1
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room."By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times"So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time
$15.00 US
Oct 28, 1976
Paperback
144 Pages
Penguin Books

The Crucible
978-0-14-048138-9
A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft—and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witch-hunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can."A drama of emotional power and impact" —New York Post
$14.00 US
Oct 28, 1976
Paperback
160 Pages
Penguin Books