Arthur Miller's play "A View from the Bridge" is a tragic masterpiece that reveals the relentless breakdown of a man in a close-knit Italian-American community in New York City during the 1950s. Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a simple man, with a strong sense of dignity and honor. For Eddie, it is a privilege to host his wife's cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, who have just arrived from Italy. However, as his niece, Catherine, begins to fall in love with one of them, it becomes evident that it is not just that Eddie believes he is too strange, too "soft," or too careless for her, but that there is something larger and deeper amiss—something wrong within Eddie in a way he cannot confront. Something that threatens the happiness of their entire family. This edition of Penguin Classics contains an introduction by the author and a new foreword by actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.