THE STORY: The play chronicles the rise of David Beeves from an auto mechanic to a successful mink rancher. However, while David’s fortunes mount, the lives of those around him are in a constant decline. David desperately searches for some meaning to his good fortune and begins to wish that some great disaster would be visited upon him and break his chain of good luck. Mr. Miller views THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK as a reverse of the story of Job. He says of the play, “the story of a man who cannot come to terms with the total destruction of his property and all his hopes, when he has done nothing to earn such treatment from God or fate, is very much the same as that of a man who can’t seem to make a mistake and whose every move turns out to be profitable and good…The simple fact is that, as moving and imperative as our fates may be, there is no possibility of answering the main question—why am I as I am and my life as it is? The more answers one supplies the more new questions arise.” In the end, David starts to come to terms with his good fortune and to feel that his luck may be of his own making and not an accident of fate.
This was Arthur Miller’s first professionally produced play, which opened in 1944. The play was adapted from an unpublished novel by Mr. Miller, begun three years earlier, and he has continued to revise the play, even as recently as 1988.
Included in the collection
The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck.
