Arthur Miller is one of America's best-known dramatists. His career spanning over six decades established him as one of the most important playwrights that America has ever produced. His most famous and performed dramas, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, have delighted and inspired both audiences and fellow dramatists all over the world. His plays have succeeded in doing much more than providing mere entertainment; they have reached their audiences and confronted them with truths about their own lives, as well as those that represent the very core of American consciousness. Arthur Miller's main themes are failure, guilt, betrayal, and most importantly perhaps, love and responsibility (Abbotson: 3). Arthur Miller continued the realistic tradition inaugurated in America in the period between the two world wars. His plays dig deep into American consciousness by exploring social and moral issues that Miller himself identifies as common to the majority of his audience.
             Miller's artistic credo forever changed the dynamics of American playwriting. His vision incorporated tension as the very core of drama. This was, in fact, the main artistic device he used in order to recreate reality in his plays, in the sense that Miller believed tension could depict the contradictory forces which operate within every individual, such as past versus present, ethics versus greed, and society versus the individual. His characters are real people, confronted with real-life situations. Nothing in his plays strikes the audience as 'hard to believe'. His characters are manufacturers, salesmen, lawyers, policemen, writers, etc. i.e. individuals representing most professions and social strata. At the same time, these people both exemplify and betray the values of society hence the tension (Bigsby: 70). A number of possible influences on Miller's work have been considered by critics; they ranged from Shakespeare to Russian writer ...