Focus

Focus

Arthur Miller

Contents

Introduction by the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Focus

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View From the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). He has also written two novels, Focus (1945) and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999), Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000, and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he won the Pulitzer Prize. He was the recipient of the National Book Foundation 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he was awarded with the prize Prince of Asturias of Letters in 2002, and in 2003 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. He died in 2005.

For Mary and Jane Ellen

Introduction by the Author

Some part of the genesis of this book must lie in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I worked the night shift in the shipfitting department during World War II, one of some sixty thousand men and a few women from every ethnic group in New York. It is no longer possible to decide whether it was my own Hitler-begotten sensitivity or the anti-Semitism itself that so often made me wonder whether, when peace came, we were to be launched into a raw politics of race and religion, and not in the South but in New York. In any case, whatever the actual level of hostility to Jews that I was witnessing, it was vastly exacerbated in my mind by the threatening existence of Nazism and the near absence among the men I worked with fourteen hours a day of any comprehension of what Nazism meant – we were fighting Germany essentially because she had allied herself with the Japanese who had attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Moreover, it was by no means an uncommon remark that we had been maneuvered into this war by powerful Jews who secretly controlled the federal government. Not until Allied troops had broken into the German concentration camps and the newspapers published photos of the mounds of emaciated and sometimes partially burned bodies was Nazism really disgraced among decent people and our own casualties justified. (It is a fiction, in my opinion, that national unity around the war reached very deep in a great many people in those times.)