"Why I Wrote The Crucible"

Arthur Miller sums up the reasons in the subtitle to his essay: "An artist's answer to politics." For a more detailed glimpse into the playwright's mind, check out this list.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 11 Unit 2's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: The Crucible, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, The New England Primer, The Trial of Martha Carrier, The Lessons of Salem, The Very Proper Gander, Declaration of Conscience, Why I Wrote The Crucible, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, Speech to the Virginia Convention, The Gettysburg Address, FDR's First Inaugural Address , JFK's Inaugural Address
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. discourse
    an extended communication dealing with some particular topic
    the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue
  2. enormity
    the quality of extreme wickedness
    How could one deal with such enormities in a play?
  3. trauma
    an emotional wound or shock having long-lasting effects
    The Crucible was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma--the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power.
  4. covert
    secret or hidden
    I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.
  5. abrogation
    an official or legal cancellation
    The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights.
  6. fanatic
    a person motivated by irrational enthusiasm
    Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.
  7. onslaught
    an offensive against an enemy
    Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us--indeed, from me.
  8. miasma
    an unwholesome atmosphere
    In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one's teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma.
  9. forthright
    characterized by directness in manner or speech
    That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration
  10. profusion
    the property of being extremely abundant
    Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.
  11. specious
    plausible but false
    Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious--that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists.
  12. theocratic
    relating to a government thought to be guided by a deity
    Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others whom you had seen in the Devil's company--an invitation to private vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state.
  13. corresponding
    similar especially in position or purpose
    The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties
  14. archaic
    so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period
    The problem was not to the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow freely off American actors' tongues.
  15. illicit
    contrary to accepted morality or convention
    But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days.
Created on Tue Nov 11 16:00:02 EST 2014 (updated Wed Nov 12 10:26:52 EST 2014)

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