Synopsis
Willy Loman is a middle-class salesman with a loving wife, Linda, and two sons, Biff and Happy. Biff is now in his 30s, a former high school football hero who wants to start a sporting goods store but has been unable to find the money to do so. Willy has also tried to raise Happy to be a man of influence, but has failed at that. Willy's life of pathos and tragedy has, in this play, become an embodiment of the pursuit of the American Dream, a pursuit gone sour. Though it is considered one of his greatest works, this play took Miller only six weeks to write.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1998-05-01 | | Series: | Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics |
| Size | | Length: | 112 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 4.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, has spent his life following the American way, living out his belief in salesmanship as a way to reinvent himself. But somehow the riches and respect he covets have eluded him. At age sixty-three, he searches for the moment his life took a wrong turn, the moment of betrayal that undermined his relationship with his wife and destroyed his relationship with Biff, the son in whom he invested his faith. Willy lives in a fragile world of elaborate excuses and daydreams, conflating past and present in a desperate attempt to make sense of himself and of a world that once promised so much.
Industry Reviews
"I set out not to 'write a tragedy' in this play, but to show the truth as I saw it."
Introduction - Arthur Miller
"The questions of whether or not 'Death of a Salesman' is a great dramatic structure, or whether or not its writing is splendid or only roughly inadequate, can hold but secondary importance in any discussion of the play. Above them one fact shines: Willy Loman, egotistical, greedy, affectionate, lonely, has risen up as a modern Everyman."
Catholic World - Sighle Kennedy (05/19/1950)
"'Death of a Salesman' is a drama of a man's journey into himself; it is a man's emotional recapitulation of the experiences that have shaped him and his values, a man's confession of the dreams to which he has been committed; and it is also a man's attempt to confront, in what is ultimately a metaphysical sense, the meaning of his life and the nature of his universe."
Reference Books - Lois Gordon
"'Death of a Salesman' has the flow and spontaneity of a suburban epic that may not be intended as poetry but becomes poetry in spite of itself because Mr. Miller has drawn it out of so many intangible sources."
New York Times - Brooks Atkinson
"All Miller knew about his new play was that it would be centered on a travelling salesman who would die at the end and that two of the lines were "Willy?" "It's all right. I came back"--words that to Miller spoke "the whole disaster in a nutshell."
New Yorker - John Lahr (01/25/1999)
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