The American Clock

The American Clock

Ebook

About the Book

A bold, vibrant panorama of the Great Depression by “the moral voice of the American stage” (The New York Times)
 
Capturing a cross-section of American life in the throes of the Great Depression, The American Clock presents what Miller called “a mural for theatre,” based loosely on Stud’s Terkel’s oral history, Hard Times. It is the story of a single family, Moe and Rose Baum and their son Lee, who lost everything in the crash of ’29. When Lee leaves Brooklyn and travels west in search of work, he comes face to face with the true scope of the Depression’s devastation and encounters a tapestry of interlocked stories unfolding across a nation in crisis. In a series of vignettes, a vast ensemble of characters sets the Baums’ struggles in relief: a shoeshine man, a corporate tycoon, a dispossessed farmer, a struggling prostitute, a young songwriter, and a communist comic-strip artist, among many disparate American identities. All the while, the clock ticks towards a new era in history, and time is running out for the Baums and the America they know.
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Penguin Plays Series

The Crucible
All My Sons
The Man Who Had All the Luck
The Creation of the World and Other Business
The Archbishop's Ceiling
The American Clock
Playing for Time
Resurrection Blues
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
Mr. Peters' Connections
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About the Author

Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was born in New York City 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, A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock (1980). He also wrote two novels, Focus (1945) and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. His later work included a memoir, Timebends (1987); the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr. Peter's Connections (1999); Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000; and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). He twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Miller was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003. More by Arthur Miller
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