The play All My Sons was inspired by real events involving a war profiteer who sold defective airplane engines to the military during World War II, resulting in pilot deaths. Arthur Miller transformed the story by making the daughter into a son who turns in his father for the crimes. The play examines themes of the American Dream, corruption, and the moral responsibility of businessmen in wartime. It was influenced by Ibsen's play The Wild Duck in its portrayal of partners in a corrupt business.

1. The play is based on actual events
Ami Matthews

2. A Doll’s House

3.  In 1858, Ibsen married Suzannah Thoreson. Ibsen
felt that, rather than merely live together, husband
and wife should live as equals, free to become their
own human beings. (This belief can be seen clearly
in A Doll’s House.)
 Ibsen moved to Italy in 1864 with the support of a
traveling grant and a stipend from the Norwegian
government. He spent the next twenty-seven years
living abroad, mostly in Italy and Germany. (Nora &
Torvald go to Italy due to Torvald‘s health)

4.  Nora was loosely based on a real person. Laura
Petersen.
 Ibsen knew of what was called the ‗Laura Kieler
affair‘, and this played some part in his creation of
the dramatic conflicts in the play. Laura Smith
Petersen - her later married name was Kieler - had
had a novel published in 1869. The following year
she got to know Ibsen and the two of them became
friends.

5.  In 1876 Victor Kieler developed tuberculosis and his
doctor advised a stay in a more southerly climate.
 Victor got angry every time they needed money for
the holiday, unknown to her husband, Laura Kieler
borrowed money to finance this & her friend signed
the documents. She gradually got into such trouble
with her creditors that, like Nora, she committed
forgery in order to get hold of some money.
 Victor recovered on holiday but 2 years later the
creditor returned wanting the money but she didn‘t
have enough.

6.  She forged a check to try and pay it off..
 Laura then had to tell her husband but Victor turned
against her, saying she was unfit to be a wife or
mother of their children.
 The affair ended in tragedy as the forgery was
discovered, her husband demanded a divorce, her
children were taken away from her, and the strain on
her nerves led to her being committed to a mental
hospital for a while. Ibsen knew about this when he
was working on A Doll`s House which was written in
1879.

7. BUT
 Once she was released from the asylum two years
later, she returned to her husband and children
because her husband urged it.
 Ibsen was so shocked by what had happened, Laura
had asked him to intervene at a crucial point in the
scandal but he didn‘t feel able or willing to.

8. All My Sons

9.  Born to prosperous parents in New York City, Miller‘s
early years were spent in relative luxury—his father
owned a successful business. But after the stock
market crash in 1929 the Millers sold their apartment
overlooking Central Park and moved to Brooklyn.
After graduating from high school in 1932 Miller
began working as a clerk in an auto-parts. –
American Dream, coming from nothing (becomes
rich and famous)
 Miller sent off an application to the University of
Michigan in hopes of escaping life at the warehouse.
He was rejected due to his grades. (he was
accepted in 1934) – Linking to Chris who wants to
educate/better himself

10.  Arthur Miller started writing All My Sons in 1945, inspired by World
War II and the true-life story, he finished the play in 1946.
 Arthur Miller‘s then mother-in-law offhandedly mentioned an article
she had read in an Ohio newspaper about a war profiteer whose
daughter had turned him into federal officials for selling faulty
machinery to the Army before running away from home. ―By the time
she had finished the tale, I had transformed the daughter into a son
and the climax of the second act was full and clear in my mind,‖
 Begun in wartime but produced in/after the war. (1947) Therefore it
wasn‘t as scandalous that it might‘ve been if accompanied an earlier
production.
 While the American death toll from World War II hovers just above
one million, almost 75,000 soldiers remain Missing in Action, the
highest number from any American war.

11.  The most highly publicised was the accusation of
Wright Aeronautical Corp. in Lockland, Ohio, a
subsidiary of the giant Curtiss-Wright Corp. In 1943,
the plant, which produced airplane engines, was
accused of manufacturing leaky, defective engines,
falsifying inspections and destroying records to cover
up its wrongdoing.
 Until the scandal, Curtiss-Wright had been among
the most prosperous companies of the wartime era,
boasting the second highest number of government
war contracts in the country. Accused of overstating
the corruption at the Lockland plant, Truman
responded, ―The facts are that they were turning out
phony engines and I have no doubt a lot of kids in
training planes have been killed as a result.‖

12.  Apparently plane's engines were sold to the military
even though manufacturer Curtiss-Wright knew they
were defective. Curtiss-Wright's senior executives
were fired and a general went to prison as a result.
 Henrik Ibsen's influence on Miller is evidenced from
the Ibsen play The Wild Duck, where Miller took the
idea of two partners in a business where one is
forced to take moral and legal responsibility for the
other. This is mirrored in All My Sons. He also
borrowed the idea of a character‘s idealism being the
source of a problem.