All My Sons is a play in three acts by Arthur Miller, first performed in 1947.
The action takes place over the course of a single day at the home of Joe Keller, the owner of a factory that manufactures machine parts. He and his wife Kate had two sons, Larry and Chris, who both served in World War II; Chris has returned home, but Larry, a pilot, is missing and presumed dead, although Kate refuses to give up hope that he is still alive.
The family is being visited by Ann Deever, who grew up in the house next door. She and Chris are planning to marry, but have not yet told Kate, because Ann was Larry's girlfriend before the war and their intentions will place them in open opposition to Kate's insistence that Larry will come home one day and everything will be the same as before.
The audience also learns over the course of the first act that Ann's father, Steve, was Joe's partner in the factory, and that he is now in prison after knowingly shipping out a batch of faulty engine components during the war that were used in military aircraft and resulted in several fatal crashes. Joe was cleared of responsibility, but still exists under a cloud of suspicion.
By the end of the day, several long-buried secrets have been unearthed, with dramatic consequences.
This play contains examples of:
- A Father to His Men: Chris Keller's Army nickname was "Mother McKeller." While little is said about his commanding abilities, he respected and was respected by his men, and was prouder to see them fighting selflessly and dying honorably (almost all were lost) than of going back to work with his father, where civilians hadn't changed their old money-grubbing ways.
- Broken Pedestal: Chris is devastated to discover that his belief in his father's integrity has been misplaced.Chris: I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.
- Calling the Old Man Out:
- Chris confronts his father and demands to know, once and for all, how much he knew about the faulty engine components. He's horrified when Joe admits he knew all about them and put off telling anyone until it was too late; when Joe attempts to justify himself by saying he was only trying to keep the Family Business going for Chris, Chris explodes, laying out a "The Reason You Suck" Speech before storming from the house.
- Larry also calls his father out, posthumously. In the final scene, Ann admits that on the day he was last seen alive, he wrote her a letter saying that he'd heard the news about their fathers being arrested, and that if he went missing she should know that he'd been unable to live with what his father had done. This is the final straw that forces Joe to confront his actions.
- Chekhov's Gun: With a literal gun; Joe's hunting rifle is mentioned early in the first act and then never alluded to again until the final page, when Joe turns it on himself in remorse.
- Driven to Suicide: It's ultimately revealed that Larry's disappearance was a suicide motivated by shame at his father's actions and the deaths they'd caused. Shortly after learning this, Joe also commits suicide.
- Family Business: Joe Keller put forty years of his life into building up a business which he badly wants his son Chris to inherit.
- Goodbye, Cruel World!: Near the end of the play, Ann admits that she's known all along Larry was dead, because his final letter to her was a suicide note, saying that he couldn't live with the shame of his father's actions and the deaths they had caused.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Joe Keller insists that the reason why he kept quiet about shipping 120 cracked engine heads until it was too late and denied all responsibility for it was that it was necessary to keep his Family Business in business.
- I Will Wait for You: Kate assumes this is why Ann has never started a new relationship after Larry disappeared, and uses it to bolster her own belief that Larry will come back one day. In fact, what Ann has been waiting for is for Chris to get up the courage to declare his feelings for her. She admits near the end of the play that Larry wrote to her just before he disappeared telling her not to wait for him, because he wasn't planning on coming back alive.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Joe has spent years telling himself that his actions in respect to the faulty airplane engines were justified because he was acting according to his duty to provide for his family. Over the course of the play, he begins to recognize how much damage he's done to his own family, and then to accept his wider responsibility. When it finally sinks in, he's devastated.
- Never My Fault: When reminded that Steve Deever blames him for the incident with the faulty engine components, Joe says dismissively that Steve is the kind of person who can never accept responsibility for his mistakes. It becomes apparent that the description applies just as much to Joe, who has been denying for years that he had anything to do with the incident, and when forced to admit that he had a hand in it still tries to minimize the blame by claiming that it was an honest mistake and that he was only doing what he had to to keep his family secure.
- She Is All Grown Up: When Ann comes to visit, several characters remark that she's grown into a woman in the years since they last saw her.
- Shirtless Scene: The second act opens with Chris doing yardwork shirtless.
- Title Drop: The title is intially somewhat enigmatic; Joe's two sons would usually be a "both" rather than an "all". It's eventually explained in the final scene, when Joe finally admits that he has a responsibility to more than just his family; speaking of the pilots who died because he considered their safety less important than his image of his sons' future, he says that in a sense "they were all my sons".
