Penguin Classics: All My Sons

All My Sons by Arthur Miller is another volume form the Penguin Classics library.  I really was impressed by his seminal plays Death of A Salesman and The Crucible, but I haven’t read anything else by him, so I decided to check this out.  It is a sort of classic family tragedy that Miller makes into a sort of classic American tragedy.  It has all the elements: lies, subterfuge, hubris, delusions and denial.  A family friend Herbert Dever takes the fall for Joe Keller when parts from their machine shop prove to be defective causing the death of many men. Keller escapes the punishment and becomes a wealthy man.  Several of these themes would be further developed in Death of a Salesman: fathers and sons, business ethics and personal morality. The question at the center of this play is what is acceptable to do in business for the sake of family that is engaging in morally suspect business, for example designing missiles designed to kill people for MacDonald Douglass.  This seems to be one issue that doesn’t seem ambiguous to me; there are plenty of things one can do to pay the bills that don’t compromise one's morally.