The American Clock

Arthur Miller / 梅绍武Shanghai Translation Publishing House · ChinaNov 2024

Rating 4.3
Word count
60K words
Chapters
6
ISBN
9787532791866

Tags

Foreign Literature Fate and FortuneCivic AwarenessComplex HumanitySocial CritiqueDocumentary NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Arthur Miller's The American Clock is a social drama set against the American Great Depression of the 1930s. According to Miller, the play was inspired by Studs Terkel's Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression and took shape over years of gestation. Terkel drew on interviews with ordinary Americans, using a journalistic form to vividly capture the damage that the economic crisis sweeping the capitalist world inflicted on the spirit and daily life of the American people in the 1930s; Miller, in turn, brought that harrowing and tragic scene to the stage with greater immediacy. The play has more than forty characters, spanning nearly every stratum of American society.

Some American theater critics have argued that the playwright's failure to focus on two or three protagonists is a flaw of the play, not realizing that Miller's intent was precisely to show that the crisis "touched virtually everyone, no matter where they lived or what their social station." In dramatic form he presents the audience with a documentary mural, emphasizing the disaster in its entirety and thereby restoring people's dignity and confidence. This form had already appeared in some of Brecht's plays and in the newsreel sections of Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, and Miller developed it further.

Editor's review

The American Clock is a social drama Arthur Miller set against the Great Depression of the 1930s. Inspired by Studs Terkel's oral history Hard Times, it brings the experiences of ordinary Americans to the stage. With more than forty characters drawn from every social stratum, the play does not center on a few protagonists; instead, it presents, in the manner of a documentary mural, how the crisis reached almost everyone. Mei Shaowu's translation faithfully conveys the play's documentary quality and sense of the stage, letting readers feel Miller's formal self-awareness: he deliberately abandons the traditional protagonist structure, piecing together a mosaic of vignettes to show the disaster in full, and in doing so restores human dignity and confidence. For readers interested in American drama, socially engaged writing, or the history of the Great Depression, this play offers both documentary value and formal inspiration. Read it as a text that calls for imagining its staging; the shifting among its many figures is itself part of Miller's design.

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Reading tips

  1. As you read, imagine the stage space and the switching between characters, viewing the ensemble vignettes as a series of continuous murals.
  2. It helps to learn the basic background of the Great Depression before entering the text, making it easier to grasp the universality of the characters' circumstances.
  3. Notice how Miller juxtaposes vignettes from different social classes to present the full picture of the crisis rather than following a single character.
  4. After reading, compare it with Terkel's Hard Times to see how oral history is transformed into dramatic form.

About the publisher

Shanghai Translation Publishing House China · Founded in 1978

Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.

Contents

  1. 版权信息
  2. 导言 美国戏剧的良心：阿瑟·米勒
  3. 两幕剧
  4. 第一幕
  5. 第二幕
  6. 演出说明

FAQ

Without a protagonist, will it be hard to get into? This is indeed a formal feature of the book. Miller deliberately avoids focusing on a few main characters, instead piecing together the full picture of the Great Depression through vignettes of over forty characters. Read it as an ensemble mural, paying attention to the juxtapositions and contrasts between vignettes rather than looking for a single plotline; once you adjust, you can feel the power of this structure.
Is this book a script or a novel? The American Clock is a social drama script, written in dramatic form with characters, scenes, and dialogue. Reading it requires engaging your imagination of the stage; there are many characters and frequent switches, which differs from the experience of reading a novel. Knowing this helps adjust your reading approach.
Why did Miller adopt this ensemble structure? According to available sources, Miller's intention was to show that the crisis touched almost everyone, regardless of where they lived or their social station. He therefore gave up focusing on a few protagonists and used a documentary mural approach to emphasize the full scope of the disaster, a form also linked to the influence of Brecht and Dos Passos.

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About the author

Arthur Miller Author · American · 1915–2005

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was an American playwright and one of the leading figures of twentieth-century American theater. His work combined social concern with a profound exploration of his characters' inner lives. His masterpiece Death of a Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, and plays such as The Crucible, All My Sons, and A View from the Bridge are also widely known. In 1956 he became famous for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee; his second wife was Marilyn Monroe. The collection includes 16 of his works, spanning drama, autobiography, and essays, commonly categorized under foreign literature, folk literature, biography, and film.

梅绍武 Author

Public information about Mei Shaowu is limited. The existing records show twelve works listed under this name, spanning categories such as mystery and detective fiction, foreign literature, folk literature, and film and television. Judging from the representative titles, he helped introduce several foreign plays and novels to Chinese readers: Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and The American Clock, as well as Nabokov's Pnin and related collections. These titles suggest that his work centered on bringing English-language drama and narrative literature to a Chinese readership; Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories in English and Chinese also serves bilingual reading and the popularization of detective fiction. Since his dates of birth and death, nationality, and personal history cannot be verified, no inferences are made here; his profile as a translator and editor rests solely on these compiled and translated works.