Miller said he found this gesture to be curious and imagined a scenario where Williams had been a servant for the Proctor family but was fired by Elizabeth for sleeping with John Proctor thus prompting Abigail to accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft.

There, he found the record of Elizabeth Proctor’s trial and was surprised to read about how Abigail Williams attempted to strike Elizabeth Proctor during her examination, but then stopped suddenly, and then lightly touched her hood and exclaimed that her hand burned when she touched her. To gather material for the play, Miller visited Salem, Massachusetts in the spring of 1952 and spent a week researching the Salem Witch Trials court records at the courthouse. This inspired Miller to take a dramatic approach to retelling the story of the trials and frame it as an allegory for the Red Scare, which he saw as a modern day witch hunt. Starkey, in which Starkey not only compared the trials to a Greek tragedy, with a clear, beginning, middle and end, but also pointed out that witch hunts were not a thing of the past and had continued to happen, in one way or another, long after people stopped believing in witches. Then, in 1949, Miller came across a newly published book about the Salem Witch Trials, titled The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem’s past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.” Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem-that I knew I had to write about the period. “I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867-a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, as he explained in an article he wrote for the New Yorker: What Inspired Arthur Miller to Write The Crucible?Īrthur Miller first got the idea to write about the Salem Witch Trials after reading a book titled Salem Witchcraft by Charles W. Miller saw examples of this in both the Red Scare, during which officials tried to force Miller himself and many other people into naming suspected communists, and also in the Salem Witch Trials, during which the accused witches were pressured into naming other suspected witches. Miller later explained that he saw many similarities between the hunt for communists in the 20 th century and the hunt for witches in the 17 th century.īut mostly, at the heart of it, the play is about what happens to a community when people start to turn on each other. The play debuted on Broadway in January of 1953 and has since become an American classic.Īlthough the play is based on the Salem Witch Trials, it was intended to be an allegory for the Red Scare during the 1940s and 50s. The Crucible is a play about the Salem Witch Trials written by Arthur Miller.

The crucible author