(1955) Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man, set in a close-knit Italian-American community in 1950s New York. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by the author and a new foreword by actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it’s a privilege to take in his wife’s cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, straight off the boat from Italy. But, as his niece Catherine begins to fall for one of them, it’s clear that it’s not just, as Eddie claims, that he’s too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong – and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can’t face. Something which threatens the happiness of their whole family. Arthur Miller (1915-2005), American dramatist, was born in New York City. In 1938 Miller won awards for his comedy The Grass Still Grows. His major achievement was Death of a Salesman, which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for drama and the 1949 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The Crucible was aimed at the widespread congressional investigation of subversive activities in the US; the drama won the 1953 Tony Award. Miller’s autobiography, Timebends: A Life was published in 1987. If you enjoyed A View from the Bridge you might like Miller’s All My Sons, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.