PROFESSIONAL CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Professional Career Development

Professional Career Development

It is clear that questions related to career decisions were asked long before "career development" became an area of interest. Arthur Miller, the great American playwright, was born to a Jewish family in New York in 1915. His grandparents had come to America from Poland. When the family business failed, they moved to Brooklyn, where A View from the Bridge is set. There, Arthur worked in a warehouse to earn money for his university fees. He began to write plays while he was a student at the University of Michigan and continued to do so after he graduated in 1938 and became a journalist. He received much acclaim from All My Sons in 1947; Death of a Salesman (1949) - which won the Pulitzer Prize - and The Crucible (1952) confirmed him as a great playwright.

Between his years as a journalist and making his name as a writer, Miller worked in the Brooklyn shipyards for two years, where he befriended the Italians he worked alongside. He heard a story of some men coming over to work illegally and being betrayed. The story inspired A View from the Bridge, which was written in 1955.

It was originally a one-act play, but Miller re-worked it into a two-act play the following year. In choosing to focus on Miller's career-long depiction of man's craving for innocence--a craving that to Miller is always morally self-destructive--Otten is bringing to bear a perspective that he began to define two decades earlier. After Innocence: Visions of the Fall in Modern Literature (1982) was a broad expose of modern writers' attack on moral idealism. Not surprisingly, Miller was one of fifteen writers treated. The Temptation of Innocence has been twenty years in the making. But first Otten sought to delve more deeply into ...