ABSTRACT
Several “accidentals” connect Arthur Miller, William Inge, and A.R.Gurney. All three are sons of businessmen. They form a representative group of commenters on the American scene. Inge wrote of small-town life in middle America during his own lifetime. Three of Miller’s plays-and those among his most famous-treat the managerial and working classes of New York. Gurney writes of upper-class urban and suburban life. Significant stages of their development as playwrights came while they were in a university, either as student or faculty. Miller and Inge are exact contemporaries. Gurney, we may say, is about a half-generation younger, but the beginning of his career overlaps the years of Inge’s flourishing and the years in which Miller came into his force.
