Description
From Arthur Miller, America’s most celebrated playwright, a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria, inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist “witch-hunts” in the 1950s”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 in an introduction to The Crucible/em, his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. 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 illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.Lexile Measure:/ NPAuthor: Arthur Miller. Copyright 2003, 176 pages, paperback, 5 x 8 inches.
