All My Sons was published by Reynal & Hitchcock in 1947 and premiered at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway on January 29, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan. It was Miller’s first commercial success and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The play established the method Miller would refine in Death of a Salesman: the slow revelation of a buried crime whose consequences destroy the family that benefited from it.
Joe Keller is a successful manufacturer in postwar suburban America. During the war, his factory produced cylinder heads for aircraft engines. When a batch of defective parts came off the line, Joe allowed them to be shipped rather than halt production and lose his government contract. Twenty-one pilots died when their engines failed. Joe’s partner Steve Deever took the blame and went to prison; Joe was exonerated. The play opens three years after the war: Joe lives comfortably, his wife Kate refuses to accept that their son Larry (a pilot who went missing during the war) is dead, and their surviving son Chris — an idealist who served in the war and saw men die — is in love with Ann Deever, Steve’s daughter and Larry’s former fiancée.
Miller’s dramatic architecture is Ibsenite: the past crime, concealed beneath the surface of domestic respectability, is gradually excavated until the full truth stands exposed. The revelation is not simply that Joe shipped the defective parts (that becomes clear midway through the play) but that Larry, knowing what his father had done, killed himself — flew his plane into the sea rather than live with the knowledge. Joe’s defense — “I did it for the family” — collapses when he realizes that the dead pilots were also someone’s sons: “They were all my sons.”
Collecting All My Sons
First edition (Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1947): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $500–$1,500
- Very good: $200–$500
- Signed: $800–$2,000