5,00 €
by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller’s classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 – ‘one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history’ – and the McCarthyism which gripped America in the 1950s.
1 in stock
“I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history,” Arthur Miller wrote of his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller’s drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminates the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.
Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “witch-hunts” in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing, “Political opposition… is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.”
| Book Condition | Used – Good |
|---|---|
| Cover | Paperback |
| Size | 127 pages, 13×20 cm |
| Published | February 24, 2000 by Penguin Classics, First published January 22, 1953 |
| Genre | Fiction, Classics, Drama, Plays |
| Awards | New York Drama Critics' Circle Award Nominee for Best American Play (1953) |
-50% Off
by John Updike
It is the year 2020. America has recently experienced a war with China, and social chaos and protection-racketeering prevail.
-50% Off
by Shirley Jackson
Malice, paranoia and creeping dread lie beneath the surface of ordinary American life in these chilling miniature masterworks of unease.
by John Steinbeck
As Nobel Prize winner Steinbeck chronicles their deeds—their multiple lovers, their wonderful brawls, their Rabelaisian wine-drinking—he spins a tale as compelling and ultimately as touched by sorrow as the famous legends of the Round Table, which inspired him.
-50% Off
by Philip Pullman
Will is twelve years old and he’s just killed a man. Now he’s on his own, on the run, determined to discover the truth about his father disappearance.
Then Will steps through a window in the air into another world, and finds himself with a companion – a strange, savage little girl called Lyra. Like Will, she has a mission which she intends to carry out at all costs.
The Leatherstocking Tales #2
by James Fenimore Cooper
‘Death and honour are thought to be the same, but today I have learned that sometimes they are not.’
-50% Off
Star Wars Legends Universe
by Troy Denning
Han and Leia struggle to keep the Empire at bay as stunning revelations from the past threaten to eclipse the future of the New Republic. . . .
-50% Off
by Ken Kesey
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…
-50% Off
by Jules Verne
Capitaine Nemo #2
An adventure classic of deep-sea volcanoes, giant squid, and the renegade scientist Captain Nemo
1 in stock