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Throug hout the twentieth cent u ry, we can see a consistent degradation America’s own view of itself, through the work of the playwrights studied. Its dreams and idealisms have, for these playwrights, fallen down around them. The Depression destroyed the dreams of economic security and the confidence in capitalism. The McCarthy trials destroyed faith in American democracy, and its position as a ‘land of the free’ was challenged by those who pointed out the vast inequalities sustained by so-called American ideals.  Playwright’s responded to these various set-backs in a variety of ways. Some like Clifford Odets wrote plays designed to act as clarion calls: calls for social reform, as idealistic and as optimistic as those of the Founding Fathers. Others, like Tennessee Williams, responded with despondency, presenting a world of decayed values in which the individual soul was irretrievably lost amid the confused jockeying of societies...

The notion of the American Dream has now established itself fully into the mythological life not only of America, but of many nations around the world – including (arguably) our own. The term ‘American Dream’ was not a commonly used one until 1931, when the popular historian James Truslow Adams attempted to use it as the title for his short history of America. His publishers were not happy with the title, preferring the eventually chosen one of The Epic of America . Adams used the term ‘American Dream’ more than 30 times throughout his book though, and in the years to follow – during which the popularity of The Epic of America became immense - the term became commonplace. Now, Jim Cullen writes that the: American Dream” has long since moved beyond the relatively musty domain of print culture into the incandescent glow of the mass media, where it is enshrined as our national motto. Jubilant athletes declaim it following championship ga...

The Depression of the 1930s had left many questioning the extent to which the America envisioned by the Founding Fathers , the America of idealism, of optimism, and of equality, had really succeeded. The old American values – happy families ensconced behind white picket fences, in rural small towns – these values were now disappearing from the American imagination as a reflection of anything other than a deluded utopianism. If the Depression had not been enough to savage such rosy idealisms, the reality of the second world war certainly would be. As Christopher Bigsby writes: "American notions of the autonomous self, secure and morally inviolable, seemed suddenly more difficult to sustain. The enemy was no longer simply modernity, the inhuman scale, the mechanical rhythms against which Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice, Sidney Kingsley and the young Miller and Williams had railed. It was a flaw in the sensibility that made betrayal seem a natural impulse and the self complicit...

Watch this video and consider the following (ALERT! Contains plotspoilers!): 1) What do we learn about each of the characters in this scene? Try mapping out each of the characters and comparing this scene with the descriptions of the characters at the beginning of the play. Watch this video and consider the following: 1) What is it that makes Ralph 'sing'? 2) Why does Jacob suggest that 'a woman insults a man's soul'? 3) Which character do you have most sympathy with? Watch this video and consider the following: 1) The opening of this scene finds Jacob reading from a communist manifesto. Why does this seem ironic? 2) Again, where do your sympathies lie in this scene? Are you convinced by Jacob? Watch this video and consider the following: 1) Bessie has, up to now, been a rather unsympathetic character. How does this scene explain the way she is? 2) Do you blame Bessie for her pragmatism? 3) Who do you think is in ...

"The Great Depression", writes Anne Fletcher, "no doubt defined the American 1930s" (2007, p. 108). It is perhaps difficult for us to understand the impact of the Depression in American in the 1930s. True, Britain had experienced its own elongated depression following two world wars which had crippled the nation financially. But for America, such deprivations made a far starker contrast to what had gone before.  Although many Americans had opposed any intervention in the war in Europe, economically the war had not hurt the nation it the way it had European countries. By the end of the war, American had leapfrogged the major European super-powers to become to most powerful nation in the world, both militarily and economically. The increased productivity for the war effort, as well, had brought about almost 100 percent employment levels, and when the restrains of wartime expenditure were lifted by the wars end, a brief peri...