After the Fall was published by Viking Press in 1964 and premiered on January 23, 1964, as the inaugural production of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, directed by Elia Kazan. The play’s reception was dominated by a single fact: its central female character, Maggie — a beautiful, emotionally volatile entertainer who rises to fame and destroys herself — was transparently based on Marilyn Monroe, who had been Miller’s wife from 1956 to 1961 and who died of a barbiturate overdose in August 1962, less than two years before the play opened.
The play’s protagonist is Quentin, a lawyer in his forties who addresses the audience directly in a continuous, non-linear monologue. He is trying to decide whether to marry his third wife, Holga, a German woman he met at a concentration camp memorial. To make this decision, he must reckon with his past: his first marriage (to Louise, an intelligent woman whose needs he failed to see), his second marriage (to Maggie, whose self-destruction he could not prevent and may have contributed to), his experience of McCarthyism (a friend named Mickey who named names), and his relationship with his own moral failures.
The concentration camp — which appears on stage as a looming tower throughout the play — is Miller’s most controversial dramatic choice. He connects Quentin’s private failures (his marriages, his compromises) to the Holocaust: not by equating them but by arguing that the capacity for betrayal and destruction exists in every human relationship, and that the concentration camp is the logical endpoint of the human refusal to take responsibility for others. The argument was attacked as grandiose and self-serving: critics felt Miller was using the Holocaust to dignify his personal guilt.
Collecting After the Fall
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1964): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75