A Memory of Two Mondays

The one-act play A Memory of Two Mondays (1955) is one of Miller's most overtly autobiographical works. It chronicles the playwright at the age of eighteen during the early 1930s when he briefly worked at an auto parts warehouse in New York to save enough money to attend college. More than just autobiographical, the play captures the sociopolitical climate of the Great Depression. It deeply resonates and brings to the surface the cultural concerns and anxieties of the period. The setting, characters, theme, style, structure and language all exemplify the social and economic tensions of the country when it was at its lowest point in the Depression, and when the country, as Miller saw it, needed a sense of hope, endurance, and solidarity. At the same time, the play speaks to the 1950s, when the country was being torn apart by McCarthyism. A Memory of Two Mondays responded to a culture caught in the grip of a Communist hysteria that turned people against each other.