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39. Quizlet game (By Christel and Lucie) --To help you revise!

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39. Quizlet game (By Christel and Lucie) --To help you revise!

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38. Conflicts in DOAS (By Kim and Capucine)

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38. Conflicts in DOAS (By Kim and Capucine)

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Copy of Conflicts in Death of a Salesman

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Happy and Biff Conflict between Willy and Biff Loman The conflict steams with Willy's parenting and way of seeing life and facing it. Biff doesn't agree with the fact that in order to be successful you have to be good looking, popular or anything else his father mentions. Willy

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Stanford University

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English for Foreign Students | Stanford University

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Fall of the hero

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Characteristics of the tragic hero Willy's downfall: Suicide - Not ordinary - Has outstanding qualities - High status (noble, prince, king, etc.) - His downfall is partially his fault - Has to have a weakness (excessive pride= hubris, ...) - Hard decisions to make When Willy

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Willy Loman enters the digital age this month, as The New York Times kicks off an online series of discussions, interviews, video presentations and perhaps the occasional heated argument about Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," which opens on Broadway on March 15 in a new production starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. Here is a play that holds a special place in American culture. But why? We'll figure out the answers together over the next several weeks.

Join in a conversation between two writers for The Times, the theater critic Charles Isherwood and the columnist Joe Nocera, about the play's relevance in a time of economic upheaval. Share with us recollections of your favorite Willy, the most movingLinda, the most boffo Biff you ever saw - whether it was on Broadway or in your high school auditorium. We'll be talking to Mike Nichols, the veteran director who is in charge of the new production, and we'll be hearing from contemporary playwrights discussing Miller's importance to their work and to the American theater. Above all we hope the series will inspire everyone to engage with this classic text with fresh eyes.If you want to dig up that dusty copy from the shelf, or download a new one, please do.

The conversations begin on March 1 on ArtsBeat: nytimes.com/artsbeat.

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'Attention Must Be Paid,' the Online Version (Published 2012)

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Willy Loman enters the digital age this month, as The New York Times kicks off an online series of discussions, interviews, video presentations and perhaps the occasional heated argument about Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," which opens on Broadway on March 15 in a new production starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.

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Spring Performance

Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman" is steeped in the sense of losses from the Great Depression. Credit... The New York Times

THERE is never a wrong time to take a fresh look at a great work of art. But some moments are riper than others for re-encountering plays in particular, which are most fully alive when they are onstage, and then retreat to the bookshelves - or digital form, today - when they are not being performed. The current moment could hardly be more opportune for another wrenching rendezvous with Willy Loman, the American dreamer fighting a losing battle with fortune in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman."

More than a decade after the last Broadway revival, Philip Seymour Hoffman takes up the burden of Willy's sample cases and the doubts, fears and dreams spilling out of them, in a new production directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Linda Emond and Andrew Garfield, opening March 15 at the Barrymore Theater.

Nobody doesn't know "Death of a Salesman," of course. It may be the first play you read in high school, or even appeared in in high school, as Mr. Hoffman did, playing Willy. (Somehow it's not hard to picture a teenage Mr. Hoffman bent down by care, schlepping those cases onstage.) Regular revivals on Broadway as well as in regional and amateur theaters have made it one of a small handful of gold-plated stage classics that have practically become a part of the collective psyche.

But the sharp economic downturn that followed the bursting of the housing bubble, and the discovery of the dubious financial practices behind it, casts a revivifying new light on the plight of the Loman family. In both its small details - paying off a mortgage after 25 hard years is a plot point - and its implied questions about the hollowness of some cherished American ideals, the play feels unusually, perhaps unhappily, timely.

In this spirit, over the next few weeks The New York Times is presenting a series of online discussions and interactive forums on the ArtsBeat blog that will explore the play and its contexts - then and now - with American playwrights, artists involved in the coming production, and readers. ( More details are here.)

In an essay written for The Times on the first anniversary of the play's 1949 opening, Miller described Willy's tragedy, in ringing tones, as that of "a man who did believe that he alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices." Hearing the "thundering command to succeed" he found himself with no recourse but "to stare in the mirror at a failure."

With employment continuing to lag and millions of homes in foreclosure, there are surely many men and women avoiding the mirror and its accusations, believing, like Willy, that their inability to achieve the golden ideal of financial success is somehow a personal indictment. In the more than half-century since the play opened the compulsion to measure a man's worth by the size of his paycheck has probably become only more pronounced in American culture.

The ethos of the banker-gods and C.E.O.'s set the overriding cultural tone for much of the last 30 years, as the salaries of leading company executives have skyrocketed, figures like Donald Trump and Warren Buffett have become national luminaries, and the care and tending of the stock market became not just a primary priority of the government but an obsession of the average American too, endlessly exposed to the gyrations of the markets via cable and network news channels.

The economic collapse - the Great Recession, it has come to be called - has ignited a prickly questioning of these priorities. The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought an intensified focus on the growing inequities in the economy and the dubious practices of the bankers so recently seen as worship-worthy titans, if not oracles. I expect there will be particularly hearty chuckles greeting a line I had forgotten from the play. When Willy is boasting to his brother that his sons are "fearless characters," his neighbor Charley wryly comments, "Willy, the jails are full of fearless characters."

Willy's brother Ben then chimes in, with a laugh: "And the stock exchange, friend."

The Great Depression was the formative event in Miller's young life. In a 1958 speech, later printed in Harper's magazine, he called it "the ground upon which I learned to stand." Born in 1915, he was the son of first-generation immigrants. His father became a successful manufacturer of women's coats, and during Miller's early years the family lived in splendor, in a town house in a neighborhood of Harlem populated by prosperous Jewish families. But Miller's father had invested much of his money in the stock market, and when the crash came in 1929, the family was cast into comparative poverty, moving from their plush town house to a small house in Brooklyn.

The character of Willy was most closely modeled on an uncle, Miller said, but his father's precipitous fall from affluence to abjection, and his restless attempts over the years to re-establish himself in business, surely find an echo in Willy's desperate determination to make himself into the success in the eyes of the world that he cannot stop imagining himself to be.

Aside from its implicit critique of the notion of valuing a man's life by the rung he occupies on the ladder of commerce, other elements in the play resonate freshly today. Among the most famous phrases, recurring in the dialogue almost like an incantation, is Willy's fervid emphasis on the importance of being "well liked," once again using a quantitative measure to establish a human being's inherent value. His son Biff, Willy asserts, will inevitably rise in the world, despite the moral failings they both swat away like pesky gnats, because he is "well liked," not merely "liked," as is Charley's studious son Bernard.

Thanks to the explosion in social media, being "well liked" has become practically a profession in itself. Adults as well as teenagers keep assiduous count of their Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and surely are inwardly if not outwardly measuring their worth by the rise or fall of the number. People are turning themselves into products, both for profit and for pleasure, and the inevitable temptation is to equate the popularity of your brand with your fundamental self-worth.

Many of us are willingly become versions of Willy Loman, forever on the road - that is, online - selling ourselves and advertising our lifestyles: describing the meal we just consumed at a restaurant (with uploaded photograph of course) or the trip we're planning to take. A social-media gadfly (or, say, me) might suggest that there are vestiges of Willy's tormenting self-doubt in the need to advertise every moment of our life so assiduously, as if constant Facebook updates could vanquish the inner voice whispering in Willy's ear that his life is built on sand.

Of course it is hardly necessary to consider the social and economic developments that are mirrored or prefigured in the drama to emerge provoked by a viewing of "Death of a Salesman." It has become an established classic not just in America but on the world's stages. (Miller himself directed a production in China in 1983.) It succeeded despite the contemporary complacency of postwar America - when it was attacked from forces on the right as ill-disguised Communist propaganda from a confirmed lefty - just as it will likely succeed in attracting audiences today who can relate to Willy's struggle to maintain a foothold in the upward-striving American middle class. (Although at more than $100 a ticket, sadly, Broadway has priced itself out of the market of a lot of middle-class Americans.)

The play moves us on any number of levels, perhaps most fundamentally as a mid-century American version of that classic dramatic archetype dating back to the Greeks: the family in mortal conflict with itself. The Loman family's conspiracy to support Willy in his delusions - at least until Biff decides he has to destroy his father's illusions to save himself - is drawn from true filial and marital love, and it is in observing how little this love can do to save Willy that the play is most devastating. He is too consumed by the belief that his failure to succeed, and to inculcate success in his sons, has somehow disqualified him for full membership in the human race.

Despite Willy's delusions and moral evasions, Miller always insisted on the nobility in his struggle. "The play is really about mortality and leaving something behind," he told The Times during an interview on the occasion of the Chinese production. "Willy Loman is trying to write his name on a cake of ice on a hot July day." His contradictions and his failings are all human and all common, which is why the hallucinatory last day of his life will always retain the power to command not just our pity but our respect too.

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'Salesman' Comes Calling, Right on Time (Published 2012)

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Spring Performance THERE is never a wrong time to take a fresh look at a great work of art. But some moments are riper than others for re-encountering plays in particular, which are most fully alive when they are onstage, and then retreat to the bookshelves - or digital form, today - when they are not being performed.

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By Mathieu

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Symbols

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28. Kim's mind map about conflicts in act I, section 3

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28. Kim's mind map about conflicts in act I, section 3

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Mind Mapping Online - Bubbl.us - kiiimkelly

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Mind map and brainstorm online with Bubbl.us! Create colorful mind maps to print or share with others. Millions of people are using Bubbl.us worldwide to generate ideas, map out processes and create presentations.

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by Matilda and Juliette

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HAPPY LOMAN LINDA LOMAN Linda truly loves her husband in spite of all his faults and always stands by him. Although she spends her life cooking, cleaning, and boosting Willy’s sense of self-importance, she never complains about the way she lives. Linda repeatedly lies to Willy,

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DOAS: Family relationships Willy and Linda Linda is Willy's wife. When there is a fight, Linda always goes on the blamed person's side. She is always present for her husband Willy is the main character and the father. He is a salesman and we can notice even from the beginning of

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Task

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Aristotle's Poetics, is (as far as we can tell) the earliest work on literary theory, and it dedicates a portion to a discussion of tragedy. Written nearly two thousand years ago, it remains influential in our understanding and appreciation of tragedy even today. Roughly one hundred pages in length, The Poetics can be read in a sitting or two. You can read the full text here.

The BBC Radio4's In Our Time, gathers a panel of experts to discuss this important work, and provides great insights into its reception and influence through the ages.

Perhaps the greatest examples of tragedy from antiquity come from Sophocles in his Oedipus trilogy, Oedipus the King, Oedipus in Colonus and Antigone. The works of Renaissance playwrights, including William Shakespeare, are replete with the tropes identified by Aristotle. The great twentieth century American playwright Arthur Miller, who penned The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, also wrote a piece for the New York Times in 1949 titled " Tragedy and the Common Man." In it, he provides an interesting modern, American take on the Aristotelian ideas of the tragic hero. Read it and see what you think.

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Why tragedies are alluring - David E. Rivas

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The story goes something like this: A royal, rich, or righteous individual - who is otherwise a lot like us - makes a mistake that sends his or her life spiraling into ruin. It's the classic story arc for a Greek tragedy, and we love it so much that we continue to use it today.

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By Raphael and Estelle

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Tragedy branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sad or terrible events encountered or caused by a hero By Raphael and Estelle Greek Tragedy In Greek tragedies the hero is often of royal descent, or someone that one admires. Aristotle defined the

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By Emma, Suzanne & Felix

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ARTHUR MILLER CONTEXT OF COMPOSITION 1915 - 2005 EARLY LIFE Arthur Miller was born in Harlem. He was raised in a pretty affluent family but they lost almost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which forced them to move from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn. At school, he

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By Margaux, Valentine & Aymie

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WHAT IT IS "The American Dream" has become a widespread term to describe the American Way of Life in general. For a lot of people "The American Dream" is connected to becoming wealthy and the ability to achieve everything if one only works hard enough for it (From rags to

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In this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Willy Lohman is weary of his life as a traveling salesman and tormented by his failure to achieve his dreams.

Learn & Explore Assign

Start learning with an activity...

Answer a few questions on each word. Get one wrong? We'll ask some follow-up questions. Use it to prep for your next quiz!

Spelling Bee

Test your spelling acumen. See the definition, listen to the word, then try to spell it correctly. Beat your last streak, or best your overall time. Spellers of the world, untie!

Vocabulary Jam

Compete head-to-head in real-time to see which team can answer the most questions correctly. Start a Jam and invite your friends and classmates to join!

1. idealist

someone not guided by practical considerations

You're a - you're an idealist!
Biff: No, I'm mixed up very bad.

2. enthralled

filled with wonder and delight

Biff (with vast affection): Sure, we'd be known all over the counties!
Happy ( enthralled): That's what I dream about, Biff.

3. incipient

only partly in existence; imperfectly formed

Happy: I told you he wouldn't like it!
Biff (angrily): Well, I'm bringing it back!
Willy (stopping the incipient argument, to Happy): Sure, he's gotta practice with a regulation ball, doesn't he?

4. regulation

Willy (stopping the incipient argument, to Happy): Sure, he's gotta practice with a regulation ball, doesn't he?

In this case, "regulation" refers to a ball that is being played and hence is in an "authoritative" state. For example, in the NBA, a ball that is "regulation" is one that is currently being "played."

5. anemic

What're you lookin' so anemic about, Bernard?

In this case, "anemic" means someone who is a "pest" or someone who is seen as being a "bother" to another.

6. regent

acting or functioning as a ruler

He's got Regents next week.

In this context, "Regents" refers to New York state exams given to high school students.

7. dispel

Fine specimen of a lady, Mother.
willy (to Charley): Heh?
ben: I'd hoped to see the old girl.
charley: Who died?

Willy (as though to dispel his confusion he angrily stops Charley's hand): That's my build!

8. poised

marked by balance or equilibrium and readiness for action

(Suddenly comes in, trips Biff, and stands over him, the point of his umbrella poised over Biff's eye.)
Linda: Look out, Biff!

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In this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Willy Lohman is weary of his life as a traveling salesman and tormented by his failure to achieve his dreams. Here are links to our lists for the play: Act I and Act II. Here is a link to our lists for The...

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Produced using Hot Potatoes by Half-Baked Software, registered to Donna Campbell.

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Literary works:
Poetry:
"Mother to Son," Langston Hughes
"First Lesson," Phyllis McGinley
"Those Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden
"My Papa's Waltz," Theodore Roethke
"Do Not Go Gentle," Dylan Thomas
"Taught Me Purple," Evelyn Tooley Hunt
"The Secret Heart," R. Tristan Coffin
Short Stories:
"Father and I," Par Lagerkvist
"Discovery of a Father," Sherwood Anderson
"Shaving," Leslie Norris

Performance Objectives: Understand dramatic literature, compare relationships in different families, write analytical essays, write similar themes in a different genre.

The FOCUS (Enduring Understandings) of this unit is "Family Relationships'
-how members of one family deal with disappointment in each other,
-how misunderstanding generates separation,
-how insights into others generate understanding and acceptance.

OTHER THEMES INCLUDE:
Individual Dignity The American Dream
The Tragic Hero Identity Crisis
Fantasizing the Truth Nature vs. The City
Unrealistic Expectations Mortality vs. Immortality

INTO:
Quickwrite: Describe the kind of relationship you have with one of your parents or a close adult. Share with a partner. Class discussion follows the paired sharing.
Exploring Relationships in Poetry: Read a series of poems, choose one to study, and form poetry-alike groups. Prepare a short oral report to class members:

THE SECRET HEART by R. Tristam Coffin

Across the years he could recall
His father one way best of all.
In the stillest hour of night
The boy awakened to a light.
Half in dreams, he saw his sire
With his great hands full of fire.
The man had struck a match to see
If his son slept peacefully.
He held his palms each side the spark
His love had kindled in the dark.
His two hands were curved apart
In the semblance of a heart.
He wore, it seemed to his small son,
A bare heart on his hidden one,
A heart that gave out such a glow
No son awake could bear to know.
It showed a look upon a face
Too tender for the day to trace.
One instant, it lit all about,
And then the secret heart went out.
But it shone long enought for one
To know that hands held up the sun .

Group Discussion Questions: What is your favorite passage? Why? What words does the speaker use to describe the boy? the father? What might be the significance of the incident in the boy's life? ie. why do you think it made a lasting impression?

FIRST LESSON by Phyllis McGinley

TAUGHT ME PURPLE by Evelyn Tooley Hunt

My mother taught me purple
Although she never wore it.
Wash-gray was her circle,
The tenement her orbit.
My mother taught me golden
And held me up to see it,
Above the broken molding,
Beyond the filthy street.
My mother reached for beauty
And for its lack she died,
Who knew so much of duty
She could not teach me pride.

Group Discussion Questions: What is your favorite passage? Why? What words does the speaker use to describe her mother? What values does the speaker mention?

Group Discussion Questions: What is your favorite passage? Why? What words does the speaker use to describe his father? What do you think the speaker was feeling as a boy? As he retells the incident?

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS by Robert Hayden

Individual Journal entry: Now that you have discussed the poem, reread your first quickwrite about your relationship with a parent. Write how the situation in the poem is similar to or different from your own life.THROUGH:
Interpreting Dramatic Characters: Keep a tri-part journal to record instances in the play about chosen characters. Column headings: "Quote from Play," "Why I Chose It," "What I Think it Means."
Example: Quote from play: Biff: "Because I know he's a fake and he doesn't like anybody around who knows." (p.65) Why I Chose It: This passage tells me a little about Biff and Willy. Biff doesn't like his father for some reason, and I need to find out more about Willy to see if Biff is correct. What I Think it Means: Biff seems to think that his father is not genuine. He thinks he's a phoney, and that his father does not want to be around anybody who sees through him. Why Biff thinks that Willy is a fake I don't know yet, but I'll be looking for clues as I read on.
Use this journal as notes to write an essay on the relationship between two characters.

Examining Character Interaction: In this section students have an opportunity to respond to quotes which have been taken from DEATH OF A SALESMAN: Read the quote and write what you think these words reveal about the characters who are interacting. Think about what is happening at the time, who is speaking and to whom, and what the passage means.
If requested, reflect on the universality of its meaning.

-1-
Linda: "He's not the finest character that ever lived.
But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is
happening to him. So attention must be paid.
He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like
an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally
paid to such a person."

-5-
Biff: Lend me ten bucks, will ya? I want to buy some new ties.
Happy: I'll take you to a place I know.Beautiful stuff.
Wear one of my striped shirts tomorrow.
Biff: She got so gray. Mom got awful old. Gee, I'm
gonna go in to Oliver tomorrow and knock him for a--
Happy: Come on up. Tell that to Dad. Let's give him a whirl. Come on.

Viewing Key Scenes: Students react to selected scenes from the video and write about the scene: two observations on Willy's dreams and one reflection on the requiem scene.

Study Questions to consider while reading/viewing play:
1. What do you think of Willy Loman? Biff Loman? What do you like about each character? What do you dislike?
2. Select a single phrase/line that stands out for you, and tell why you think it is important.
3. Explain how Ben and Charley are opposite from Willy. What brings success to Charley and Ben?
4. Describe the way the Loman family deals with problems. Do you see any similarities/differences in your own family? Explain.
5. Does anyone in the play remind you of someone you know? Explain.
6. Whom do you most identify with and why? Whom do you least identify with?
7. Identify and discuss three important ideas in the play.
8. Some critics argue that the play is about Willy Loman. Others believe the story is about Willy and Biff equally. Choose a position and argue for it.
9. How did Willy's attitude toward Biff when he was growing up hurt him as an adult?
10. Biff blames his father for many of his problems in life. When is a parent responsible for what happens in their child's life? When is the child responsible?

BEYOND:

Creating a Script from a Short Story: Students read one of three short stories and write a script based on the short story:
"Shaving"
1. Describe the relationship between father and son as it emerges in the scene in which Barry skillfully and gently shaves his father.
2. Near the end of the story, we read that the father had "let go all his authority, handed it over." Explain what you think this passage means.
3. Compare this father/ son relationship with the one in the play, Death of a Salesman? Explain.

"Father and I"
1. How does the young boy's feelings towards his father change from the beginning to the end of the story?
2. At the end of the story, the narrator says "It wasn't a real world, a real life. It just hurtled, blazing, into the darkness that had no end." Explain what he means.
3. Do you see any similarities/differences between this father/son relationship and the one in the play, Death of a Salesman? Explain.

"Discovery of a Father"
1. Sherwood Anderson says, "You hear it said that fathers want their sons to be what they feel they cannot themselves be, but I tell you it also works the other way." What does he mean?
2. "He had become blood of my blood; he the strong swimmer and I the boy clinging to him in the darkness. We swam in silence and in silence we dressed in our wet clothes, and went home." Using this phrase, explain the change that takes place in the author's ideas about his relationship with his father.
3. Compare this father/ son relationship with the one in the play, Death of a Salesman? Explain.

Original script: Students have option to write an original script.

Autobiographical Incident Biff Loman has a problem communicating with his father, Willy Loman. Their differences of opinion about success lead to arguments and misunderstandings. Write an essay of a time when a difference of opinion created a communications problem with your parents. State specifically what the problem was and tell what happened as a result of the differences. What did you learn from this experience?

Reflective Essay We learn about life through experiences, both real and fictional. For example, in Death of a Salesman, we learn more about how family members deal with disappointments, misunderstandings, separation, and finally insight and acceptance. Write an essay in which you consider life's disappointments and expectations in society by exploring the lives of people you know and the lives of the fictional characters in the play.

Interpretation Write an essay interpreting the relationship between Willy and Biff Loman in the play, Death of a Salesman. Include specific references from the work. Your aim is to convince your readers that your ideas about the two characters are reasonable, and based on a thoughtful reading of the play.

Evaluation The play, Death of a Salesman was first produced in 1949. Write an essay evaluating the play in terms of how it is relevant to families today. Support your judgment with experiences taken from the lives of yourself and your friends as well as with specific examples from the play.

Report of Information Willy Loman seemed to have a solid friendship with Charley, his next door neighbor. There are many qualities that make a good friend. Write an essay explaining several qualities that make a good friend. Support your ideas with details, facts, and examples.

Observational Writing Several times in the play Willy Loman returns to the happy times he spent with his family members. Write an essay about a happy event you have observed. Describe the people, the cause of the happiness, the event itself, where it took place, and the outcome. Use dialogue if appropriate. Include the kind of details that will help your readers imagine this event and why it stands out in your mind.

Speculation about Causes and Effects Willy Loman refuses to take the job that his friend, Charley offers him, and commits suicide at the end of the play. Write an essay explaining why you think Willy behaves in this manner. What effect does his suicide have on the rest of the Loman family? Develop these ideas with evidence. Convince your readers that you have read the play carefully and thought deeply about the possible reasons for Willy's actions.

Controversial Issue When Willy Loman asks his boss, Howard to give him a job at the office so he won't have to travel, Howard refuses. In this scene, Howard tells Willy to ask his sons to help him out, and suggests that "This is no time for false pride." Willy brushes off that suggestions, saying that his sons are working on "a very important deal," and that he can't impose on them. Should children be responsible for their aging parents? Or should society care for them? Write an essay on this problem. State your position and use arguments to defend it. Your goal is the persuade your readers to accept your viewpoint.

Discovering the Author may be used as an INTO or BEYOND activity as seen fit by the teacher. Students prepare a bio. of Miller

Timed writing: Death of a Salesman

DIRECTIONS: READ BOTH ESSAY QUESTIONS. RESPOND TO ONLY ONE IN DEPTH. DO NOT COMBINE THE QUESTIONS OR ATTEMPT TO ANSWER BOTH.
A character's attempt to recapture the past is important in many plays, novels, and poems. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, for example, may view the past with such feelings as reverence, bitterness, or longing. Show with clear evidence from the work how the character's view of the past is used to develop a theme in the work.

OR OR OR OR OR OR OR.....

Unlike the novelist, the playwright does not use his own voice and only rarely uses a narrator's voice to guide a reader's or audience's responses to character and action. Write an essay in which you explain the techniques the playwright uses to guide his audience's responses to the central action and characters. You might consider the effect of things like setting, the use of comparable and contrasting characters, and the characters' responses to each other. Support your argument with specific references.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Read the passages and answer the following questions:
1. Who said it? 3. What was happening in the play?
2. To whom was it said? 4. What does it mean?

1. "He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person."
2. "Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eight-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved by so many different people?"
3. "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away--a man is not a piece of fruit!"
4. "Why boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich."
5. "He walked away. I saw him for one minute. I got so mad I could've torn the walls down! How the hell did I ever get the idea I was a salesman there? I even believed myself that I'd been a salesman for him! And then he gave one look and--I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We've been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was a shipping clerk."
6. "Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way."
7. "I'm getting married, Pop, don't forget it. I'm changing everything. I'm gonna run that department before the year is up. You'll see, Mom."
8. "Oh, Ben, that's the whole beauty of it! I see it like a diamond, shining in the dark, hard and rough, that I can pick up and touch in my hand. Not like-like an appointment! This would not be another damned-fool appointment, Bend, and it changes all the aspects. Because he thinks I'm nothing, see, and so he spites me. But the funeral-- Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates--that boy will be thunder-struck, Ben, because he never realized--I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey--I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all. He'll see what I am, Ben! He's in for a shock, that boy!"
9. "He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong."
10. "Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back--that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

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Literary works: Poetry: "Mother to Son," Langston Hughes "First Lesson," Phyllis McGinley "Those Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden "My Papa's Waltz," Theodore Roethke "Do Not Go Gentle," Dylan Thomas "Taught Me Purple," Evelyn Tooley Hunt "The Secret Heart," R.

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15. Death of a Salesman and the American Dream

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15. Death of a Salesman and the American Dream

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Death of a Salesman and the American Dream

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INTRODUCTION TOARTHUR MILLER'SDEATH OF A SALESMANFOR 12TH GRADE ENGLISHSTUDENTS AGED 16-18By Elizabeth Cron

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Arthur Miller Introduction

By the time American playwright Arthur Miller died in 2005, he had written more than two dozen plays over the course of a career that lasted almost 70 years. Though he's best remembered for standouts like Death of a Salesman, , and The Crucible, every play Miller wrote was created with the same goal-to make the world a better place, even if it meant, as he once said, "grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck."blank">Reaganism, to the failure of the American Dream, all in a way that helped audiences understand the issue by showing them a piece of themselves.

His go-to piece was the spleen, until the police were like, "Arthur, stop showing people their spleens, this is seriously messed up."

Miller was a relentless critic of America, in part because he believed so passionately in its promise. His own life was a version of the American Dream writ large-the son of hard-working immigrants, he rose to prominence via his own talent, married America's reigning bombshell, Marilyn Monroe, and fought off McCarthyism with the strength of his own principles. He changed American theater, but he also changed America.

Wow. The only thing we've changed recently is our underwear.

...Actually, scratch that. We haven't changed anything recently.

Arthur Miller Trivia

According to Miller's autobiography, when the character of John Proctor was executed at one 1953 performance of The Crucible, the audience "stood up and remained silent for a couple of minutes, with heads bowed," for at that same moment Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were being electrocuted for espionage.

Miller had serious beef with "The Lion King." The flamboyant Broadway adaptation of the animated Disney flick stood for everything the playwright believed was wrong with modern theatre.

In 1966, Miller's third wife Inge Morath gave birth to their son Daniel, who was born with Down Syndrome. The couple placed the boy in an institution. Miller never publicly acknowledged his disabled son, and Daniel was not present at any of Miller's memorial services.

Miller fell out with his longtime friend Elia Kazan over his response to HUAC subpoenas. Whereas Kazan named names, Miller refused to do so. However, some speculate that the men's shared attraction to Marilyn Monroe also played a part in their split-Kazan introduced Miller to Monroe, whom he had previously dated.

When Miller and Marilyn Monroe married in 1956, the acerbic writer Norman Mailer described their marriage as the joining of "the Great American Brain" and "the Great American Body." We hope she used a certain finger on that "Great American Body" to convey her feelings towards "the Great American Butthole."

As president of the writers' rights-group PEN, Miller wrote a letter in 1966 pleading for clemency for Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who was facing execution. When General Yakuba Gowon got Miller's letter, he contacted him to ask "with some incredulity whether I was the writer who had been married to Marilyn Monroe," Miller recalled. When the playwright confirmed that the bombshell had indeed been his wife, Gowon ordered Soyinka released. Soyinka won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature. TL;DR: Marilyn Monroe is a lifesaving hero.

Miller was elected to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

When Vanessa Redgrave was cast as a Holocaust survivor in film Playing for Time, which Miller wrote, Jewish groups protested the decision because of her outspoken support of Palestinians. Miller refused to have her removed from the movie, saying, "To fire her now because of her political views would be blacklisting."

Miller's daughter Rebecca is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who played the lead in the 1996 film version of The Crucible.

Miller was also apparently born without a soul. C'mon, dude...it's "The Lion King." It's not supposed to be high art.

Arthur Miller Resources

Books

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949)
Critics have said that if Arthur Miller had never written anything but Death of a Salesman, he would still be considered a great playwright. The tragedy of Willie Loman is a monument to the disappointments of the American Dream. This play won more awards, including a Tony and Pulitzer, than any of Miller's other works.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)
Miller's play about the Salem Witch Trials premiered as America was undergoing its own sort of witch hunt, with Senator Joseph McCarthy destroying lives in search of suspected communists. The real-life parallels are fascinating, but on its own The Crucible is a wrenching look at desire, fear, loyalty and courage.

Music

The Crucible Opera
Composer Robert Ward wrote an opera in 1961 based on Miller's play. The tension and life-or-death significance of the action in The Crucible lends itself to operatic drama. Ward's opera won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962.

A View From the Bridge
Miller co-wrote the libretto for this opera, which is based on a one-act play Miller wrote in 1955. It focuses on life among New York's dockworkers. Miller and his friend Elia Kazan discussed this idea some years earlier-for Miller it became A View from the Bridge, and for Kazan it became the film On the Waterfront.

Images

Movies & TV

Death of a Salesman (1985)
A 1951 film by Hungarian director Laslo Benedek was the first adaptation of Miller's classic play, but this made-for-TV production counts as our favorite. Dustin Hoffman stars as Willy Loman and John Malkovich plays his son Biff. Both men won Emmys for their roles. After this movie Hoffman went on to play an autistic person in "Rain Man," and John Malkovich went on to be fantastically creepy in everything else.

Websites

Death of a Salesman
In 1999, director Robert Falls staged a revival of Death of a Salesman on Broadway, starring Brian Dennehy. The production was a huge success, and this website was created as a companion to the play. Its coolest feature is a compilation of reviews of every major Broadway production of Salesman from 1949 to 1999.

Video & Audio

Death of a Salesman
An interview with Miller about his reasons for writing the play, spliced with scenes of Dustin Hoffman's performance in Death of a Salesman.

Primary Sources

Oates on Loman
An essay by writer Joyce Carol Oates about Death of a Salesman.

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By the time American playwright Arthur Miller died in 2005, he had written more than two dozen plays over the course of a career that lasted almost 70 years.

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Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915-February 10, 2005) is considered one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, having created some of America's most memorable plays over the course of seven decades. He is the author of " Death of a Salesman," which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and " The Crucible." Miller is known for combining social awareness with a concern for his characters' inner lives.

Fast Facts: Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, New York to a family with Polish and Jewish roots. His father Isidore, who came to the U.S. from Austria-Hungary, ran a small coat-manufacturing business. Miller was closer to his mother Augusta Barnett Miller, a native New Yorker who was a teacher and an avid reader of novels.

His father's company was successful until the Great Depression dried up virtually all business opportunities and shaped many of the younger Miller's beliefs, including the insecurity of modern life. Despite facing poverty, Miller made the best of his childhood. He was an active young man, in love with football and baseball.

When he wasn't playing outside, Miller enjoyed reading adventure stories. He also kept busy with many boyhood jobs. He often worked alongside his father; other times, he delivered bakery goods and worked as a clerk in an auto parts warehouse.

After working at several jobs to save money for college, in 1934 Miller left the East Coast to attend the University of Michigan, where he was accepted into the school of journalism. He wrote for the student paper and completed his first play, "No Villain," for which he won a university award. It was an impressive beginning for a young playwright who had never studied plays or playwriting. What's more, he had written his script in just five days.

He took several courses with Professor Kenneth Rowe, a playwright. Inspired by Rowe's approach to constructing plays, after graduating in 1938, Miller moved back East to begin his career as a playwright.

Miller wrote plays as well as radio dramas. During World War II, his writing career gradually became more successful. (He couldn't serve in the military because of a football injury.) In 1940 he finished "The Man Who Had All the Luck," which reached Broadway in 1944 but closed after only four performances and a pile of unfavorable reviews.

His next play to reach Broadway came in 1947 with "All My Sons," a powerful drama that earned critical and popular praise and Miller's first Tony Award, for best author. From that point on, his work was in high demand.

Miller set up shop in a small studio that he had built in Roxbury, Connecticut, and wrote Act I of " Death of Salesman" in less than a day. The play, directed by Elia Kazan, opened on February 10, 1949, to great acclaim and became an iconic stage work, earning him international recognition. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, the play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and swept all six of the Tony categories in which it was nominated, including best direction, best author, and best play.

Communist Hysteria

Since Miller was in the spotlight, he was a prime target for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In an age of anti-communism fervor, Miller's liberal political beliefs seemed threatening to some American politicians, which is unusual in retrospect, considering that the Soviet Union banned his plays.

Miller was summoned before the HUAC and was expected to release names of any associates he knew to be communists. Unlike Kazan and other artists, Miller refused to give up any names. "I don't believe a man has to become an informer in order to practice his profession freely in the United States," he said. He was charged with contempt of Congress, a conviction that was later overturned.

In response to the hysteria of the time, Miller wrote one of his best plays, "The Crucible." It is set during another time of social and political paranoia, the Salem Witch Trials, and is an insightful criticism of the phenomenon.

Marilyn Monroe

By the 1950s, Miller was the most recognized playwright in the world, but his renown wasn't only because of his theatrical genius. In 1956, Miller divorced Mary Slattery, his college sweetheart with whom he had had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert. Less than a month later he married actress and Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, whom he'd met in 1951 at a Hollywood party.

From then on, he was even more in the limelight. Photographers hounded the famous couple and the tabloids were often cruel, puzzling over why the "world's most beautiful woman" would marry such a "homely writer." Author Norman Mailer said their marriage represented the union of "the Great American Brain" and "the Great American Body."

They were married for five years. Miller wrote little during that period, with the exception of the screenplay for "The Misfits" as a gift for Monroe. The 1961 film, directed by John Huston, starred Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. Around the time the film was released, Monroe and Miller divorced. A year after divorcing Monroe (she died the following year), Miller married his third wife, Austrian-born American photographer Inge Morath.

Later Years and Death

Miller continued to write into his 80s. His later plays didn't attract the same attention or acclaim as his earlier work, though film adaptations of "The Crucible" and "Death of a Salesman" kept his fame alive. Much in his later plays dealt with personal experience. His final drama, "Finishing the Picture," recalls the turbulent last days of his marriage to Monroe.

In 2002, Miller's third wife Morath died and he soon was engaged to 34-year-old painter Agnes Barley, but he became ill before they could marry. On February 10, 2005-the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of "Death of a Salesman"-Miller died of heart failure at his home in Roxbury, surrounded by Barley, family, and friends. He was 89 years old.

Miller's sometimes bleak view of America was shaped by his and his family's experiences during the Great Depression. Many of his plays deal with the ways capitalism affects the lives of everyday Americans. He thought of theater as a way to speak to those Americans: "The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities," he said.

He established the Arthur Miller Foundation to help young artists. After his death, his daughter Rebecca Miller focused his mandate on expanding the arts education program in New York City public schools.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Miller won two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, two Emmy Awards, three Tony Awards for his plays, and a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also received the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award and was named Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001.

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Biography of Arthur Miller, Major American Playwright

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Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915-February 10, 2005) is considered one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, having created some of America's most memorable plays over the course of seven decades. He is the author of " Death of a Salesman," which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and " The Crucible."

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In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche. His probing dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times, allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents. By 1928, the family had moved to Brooklyn, after their garment manufacturing business began to fail. Witnessing the societal decay of the Depression and his father's desperation due to business failures had an enormous effect on Miller. After graduating from high school, Miller worked a number of jobs and saved up the money for college. In 1934, he enrolled in the University of Michigan and spent much of the next four years learning to write and working on a number of well-received plays.

After graduating, Miller returned to New York, where he worked as a freelance writer. In 1944, his first play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck", opened to horrible reviews. A story about an incredibly successful man who is unhappy with that success, "The Man Who Had All The Luck" was already addressing the major themes of Miller's later work. In 1945, Miller published a novel, FOCUS, and two years later had his first play on Broadway. "All My Sons," a tragedy about a manufacturer who sells faulty parts to the military in order to save his business, was an instant success. Concerned with morality in the face of desperation, "All My Sons" appealed to a nation having recently gone through both a war and a depression.

Only two years after the success of "All My Sons," Miller came out with his most famous and well-respected work, "Death of a Salesman." Dealing again with both desperation and paternal responsibility, "Death of a Salesman" focused on a failed businessman as he tries to remember and reconstruct his life. Eventually killing himself to leave his son insurance money, the salesman seems a tragic character out of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. Winning both a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Critics Circle Award, the play ran for more than 700 performances. Within a short while, it had been translated into over a dozen languages and had made its author a millionaire.

Overwhelmed by post-war paranoia and intolerance, Miller began work on the third of his major plays. Though it was clearly an indictment of the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, "The Crucible" was set in Salem during the witch-hunts of the late 17th century. The play, which deals with extraordinary tragedy in ordinary lives, expanded Miller's voice and his concern for the physical and psychological wellbeing of the working class. Within three years, Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and convicted of contempt of Congress for not cooperating. A difficult time in his life, Miller ended a short and turbulent marriage with actress Marilyn Monroe. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote very little of note, concentrating at first on issues of guilt over the Holocaust, and later moving into comedies.

It was not until the 1991 productions of his "The Ride Down Mount Morgan" and "The Last Yankee" that Miller's career began to see a resurgence. Both plays returned to the themes of success and failure that he had dealt with in earlier works. Concerning himself with the American dream, and the average American's pursuit of it, Miller recognized a link between the poverty of the 1920s and the wealth of the 1980s. Encouraged by the success of these works, a number of his earlier pieces returned to the stage for revival performances.

More than any other playwright working today, Arthur Miller has dedicated himself to the investigation of the moral plight of the white American working class. With a sense of realism and a strong ear for the American vernacular, Miller has created characters whose voices are an important part of the American landscape. His insight into the psychology of desperation and his ability to create stories that express the deepest meanings of struggle, have made him one of the most highly regarded and widely performed American playwrights. In his eighty-fifth year, Miller remains an active and important part of American theater.

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Arthur Miller Biography | American Masters | PBS

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In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche.

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Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Quick Facts "The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.""You know, a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them.""The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.""A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse. "

Who Was Arthur Miller?

Playwright Arthur Miller attended the University of Michigan before moving back East to write dramas for the stage. He earned widespread praise for Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize along with multiple Tonys. He received more acclaim for his award-winning follow-up, The Crucible, which reflected his unwavering refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller's public life was painted in part by his rocky marriage to Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. The playwright died in 2005 at the age of 89, leaving a body of work that continues to be re-staged internationally and adapted for the screen.

Early Life and Education

Miller was born in Harlem, New York, on October 17, 1915, to an immigrant family of Polish and Jewish descent. His father, Isidore, owned a successful coat manufacturing business, and his mother, Augusta, to whom he was closer, was an educator and an avid reader of novels.

The affluent Miller family lost almost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and had to move from Manhattan to Flatbush, Brooklyn. After graduating high school, Miller worked a few odd jobs to save enough money to attend the University of Michigan. While in college, he wrote for the student paper and completed his first play, No Villain, for which he won the school's Avery Hopwood Award. He also took courses with playwright and professor Kenneth Rowe. Inspired by Rowe's approach, Miller moved back East to begin his career as a playwright.

Early Career & 'Death of a Salesman'

Miller's career got off to a rocky start. His 1944 Broadway debut, The Man Who Had All the Luck, garnered a fate that was the antithesis of its title, closing after just four performances with a stack of woeful reviews. Focus, Miller's novel about anti-Semitism, was published a year later. His next play, All My Sons, was a hit in 1947, running for almost a full year on Broadway and earning Miller his first Tony Award for Best Author.

Working in a small studio that he built in Roxbury, Connecticut, Miller wrote the first act of Death of a Salesman in less than a day. The play, directed by Elia Kazan, opened on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre, and was adored by nearly everyone, becoming an iconic stage work.

The drama follows the travails of Willy Loman, an aging Brooklyn salesman whose career is in decline and who finds the values that he so doggedly pursued have become his undoing. New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson described Willy Loman in his 1949 review of the play: "In his early sixties he knows his business as well as he ever did. But the unsubstantial things have become decisive; the spring has gone from his step, the smile from his face and the heartiness from his personality. He is through. The phantom of his life has caught up with him. As literally as Mr. Miller can say it, dust returns to dust. Suddenly there is nothing."

Salesman won Miller the highest accolades in the theater world: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony for Best Play. (The work, in fact, swept all of the six Tony categories in which it was nominated, including for Best Direction and Best Author.)

Marriage to Marilyn Monroe

In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, his former college sweetheart with whom he had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert. Less than a month later, Miller married actress and Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, whom he'd first met in 1951 at a Hollywood party. At the time, Monroe was dating Kazan, who had directed Miller's All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. When Kazan asked Miller to keep Monroe company while he dated another actress, Miller and Monroe struck up a friendship that turned into a romance. Author Norman Mailer called their marriage the union of "the Great American Brain" and "the Great American Body."

Miller and Monroe's high-profile marriage placed the playwright in the Hollywood spotlight. At the time of their marriage, he told the press that Monroe would curtail her movie career for the "full-time job" of being his wife.

'The Crucible' & McCarthyism

Later in 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) refused to renew Miller's passport, and called him to appear before the committee. His 1953 play, the Tony Award-winning The Crucible, a dramatization of the Salem witch trials of 1692 and an allegory about McCarthyism, was believed to be one of the reasons why Miller came under the committee's scrutiny. Miller refused to comply with the committee's demands to "out" people who had been active in certain political activities and was thus cited in contempt of Congress.

In 1957, Brooks Atkinson wrote about Miller's stand against HUAC: "He refused to be an informer. He refused to turn his private conscience over to administration by the state. He has accordingly been found in contempt of Congress. That is the measure of the man who has written these high-minded plays."

The contempt ruling was overturned two years later.

Divorce and Marilyn's Death

Miller and Monroe were married for five years, during which time the tragic sex symbol struggled with personal troubles and drug addiction. Miller barely wrote during their marriage, except for penning the screenplay of The Misfits as a gift for Monroe. The 1961 film, directed by John Huston, starred Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. Around the same time as The Misfits release, Monroe and Miller divorced.

Monroe died the following year, and Miller's controversial 1964 drama After the Fall was believed to have been partially inspired by their relationship. Miller was criticized for capitalizing on his marriage to Monroe so soon after her death, although the playwright denied this. Miller responded to his critics by saying: ''The play is a work of fiction. No one is reported in this play. The characters are created as they are in any other play in order to develop a coherent theme, which in this case concerns the nature of human insight, of self-destructiveness and violence toward others.''

In 1962, Miller married Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath. The couple had two children, Rebecca and Daniel. Miller insisted that their son, Daniel, who was born with Down syndrome, be excluded from the family's personal life. The infant was institutionalized, and Morath reportedly tried to bring him home as a toddler but to no avail.

Years later, actor Daniel Day-Lewis who married Miller's daughter Rebecca, visited his wife's brother frequently. Day-Lewis eventually persuaded Miller to make further contact with his adult son, who had been able to establish a happy life with outside support. Daniel's existence was unknown to most of the public until after Miller's death.

Other Works

Miller's other plays include A View From the Bridge (1955), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The American Clock (1980) and Broken Glass (1994).

In his later career, Miller continued to explore societal and personal issues that probed the American psyche, though critical and commercial responses to the work didn't garner the acclaim of his earlier productions.

He also wrote the 1980 TV movie Playing for Time and an adaptation for the theater. The project was based on the autobiography of Fania Fénelon, who was a member of an all-women's orchestra that was imprisoned at the Auschwitz death camps during the Holocaust. The film courted controversy from Jewish organizations and Fénelon herself for its casting of Vanessa Redgrave, who had criticized Zionism and supported Palestinian organizations.

In addition to his plays, Miller collaborated with Morath on books including In the Country (1977) and 'Salesman' in Beijing (1984). In 1987, Miller published his autobiography Timebends: A Life. In his autobiography, he wrote that when he was young he "imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do."

Miller's plays have become American classics that continue to speak to new generations of audiences. Death of a Salesman has had numerous screen adaptations, including a 1985 TV version that starred Dustin Hoffman, who also starred in the previous year's Broadway revival. In 1996, a film adaptation of The Crucible hit theaters, starring Winona Ryder, Joan Allen and Day-Lewis. Miller penned the screenplay, which earned him the sole Academy Award nomination of his career.

Death of a Playwright

In 2002, Miller's third wife, Morath, died. He soon was engaged to 34-year-old minimalist painter Agnes Barley but fell into ill health before they could walk down the aisle. On February 10, 2005, the 56th anniversary of Death of a Salesman's Broadway debut, Miller died of heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, surrounded by Barley, family and friends. He was 89 years old.

In March 2018, HBO aired the documentary Arthur Miller: Writer. Directed and narrated by his daughter Rebecca, the piece chronicled the life of the great American playwright, from the creation of his iconic plays, to his marriage to Monroe to his relationships with family members.

Fact Check

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Quick Facts "The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost." "You know, a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough.

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Who Is Willy Loman? Discover the Protagonist of ‘Death of a Salesman’

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This is an analysis of the central character in “Death of a Salesman.” Explore Willy Loman’s childhood, his affair, and his relationships.

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Death of a Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theater in Philadelphia. In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller recalls that directly across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was performing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and the play's director, Elia Kazan, thought it might be a good idea to expose Lee J. Cobb, who played Willy Loman, to the majesty and exuberance of the music to inspire him for the ordeal to come:

Whatever stirred the spirit in Cobb, he did perform mightily, along with the rest of the cast, and from that night forward audiences and critics have praised the play as precisely that "continuation of a long and undying past" stretching from the Greek theater to the present day.

It is hoped that the aura of Salesman in its 50th year enhances and does not erase the accomplishments of Arthur Miller during the last decade, when new plays and revivals have kept his words before audiences around the world. One thinks of the Roundabout Theater's 1992 revival of The Price, the National Actors Theater's production of The Crucible, the 1994 Olivier Best Play Award for the London production of Broken Glass, and the successful 1996 Nicholas Hytner film version of The Crucible. During the summer of 1997, the Williamstown Theater Festival staged All My Sons (directed by Barry Edelstein) and The Ride Down Mount Morgan (directed by Scott Elliott); shortly thereafter these productions moved to New York City. In October of 1997, the Signature Theatre Company in New York opened its season with The American Clock (directed by James Houghton) and concluded a year of Miller plays with a new work, Mr. Peters' Connections (directed by Garry Hynes). Meanwhile a revival of A View from the Bridge at the Roundabout Theater Company, directed by Michael Mayer, introduced this play to a new generation of viewers. The enthusiasm of these young directors, all in their thirties, contributed, in part, to the success of these productions.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, however. In high schools and colleges, in small towns and large cities all over the world, people are discovering daily the power of Arthur Miller's plays. If Salesman remains the flagship of his great career, a score of other dramatic pieces continue to link "a long and undying past" to the present moment of the contemporary stage.

On September 17, 1997, I interviewed Arthur Miller in his East Side, New York City apartment. The occasion provided the playwright with the opportunity to talk about Death of a Salesman fifty years after its successful Broadway premiere on 10 February 1949. Although the interview focused on Salesman, Miller was free to take the conversation in any direction he felt suitable.

kullman: Death of a Salesman will soon be fifty years old. What are your thoughts at this time about your masterpiece?

miller: One thing that strikes me now has occurred to me from time to time. I directed Death of a Salesman in China and I also directed it in Stockholm in Swedish. The reactions of casts and audiences, with a few very small differences, are the same as with other productions around the world. Since Salesman is involved so intimately with American civilization (it seems like the completely American play), how true is it that these cultures are all that different? Some of the etiquette is different. People don't address parents quite the way Americans do, and there is also a question of intimacy. Americans make a play at being very intimate very quickly, which seems disrespectful sometimes to people who aren't used to instant emotional closeness. For example, in China, in the scene where one of the brothers (they're both seemingly asleep), asks the other whether he's sleeping, the Chinese find that very strange. I said, "Why is that strange?" They replied, "It would be impolite to awaken him." Every play shows cultural idiosyncrasies in a foreign production, but I was pleased at how the main thrust of the play becomes very Swedish or very Chinese.

kullman: You describe in Timebends a Chinese man coming up to you and saying, "It's what we all want, the dream, to have it all." Coming from a communist country, doesn't such a comment seem strange?

miller: It makes me wonder every time it opens in another country. How will the play be understood or misunderstood?

kullman: Madrid, not known for its liberal politics, had a very famous production of Salesman, too, didn't it?

miller: They've had several over the years. Whole generations of actors have come and gone, riding on that shoeshine. One question that keeps rising in my mind is what really are the cultural differences among people.

kullman: There's just been an African-American cast of Salesman which performed at New Stage Theater in Jackson, Mississippi. And I know that After the Fall was done with a black actress some time ago in London. Recently, August Wilson and Robert Brustein debated interracial cross-casting of plays. Brustein was in favor and Wilson was very much against having white people play black parts in his plays. How do you feel about all-black productions of Salesman?

miller: The first of those was at least twenty-five years ago in Baltimore.

kullman: Did it work?

miller: Well, it didn't, I didn't think. I went down to see it, but the actors weren't that good. It had nothing to do with race. When the acting is terrific, the whole thing works. But that's true whether they're white or black or Chinese. If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around. There would always be the lingering question of how could this possibly happen? Or, reversing the field, let's suppose you were going to do O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, and you decided you were going to use a white actor in the central role and black actors in other roles, what happens to the play? Wilson has a point. I think he's got an agenda that's political and immoral. But there is a real question about cross-casting. I don't think you can give a blanket answer. I can see where you can play a black Hamlet if he were an original enough actor. James Earl Jones could have done it. I would believe him because his emotional range is so profound. It's hard enough on a white actor. When he's got to overcome the social barriers of color, at the same time, he's got to be almost twice as good doing the role.

kullman: And it seems in August Wilson's plays a lot is directed toward the situation of the African American family in America, so racial appearance and identity become much more important.

miller: It's very tangled. There's no single answer. . . . I guess Salesman's ability to somehow transcend the moment that it was written in has contributed to its long-lasting success, but that's really an enigma to start with. You see, that play was written in 1948, when we were starting the biggest boom in the history of the United States. However, a good part of the population, including me and President Truman, were prepared for another depression. We had only escaped the first depression by the advent of war. It was, I think, a year and a half into the war before we absorbed all the unemployed; therefore, what were all these young guys going to do when they came home? There had to be another crisis. We turned out to be completely cockeyed. The fact of the matter is that the Marshall Plan supplied the cash to Europe to consume everything we could manufacture. The boom began that way. We were the only real money in the world. Every other European currency was weak, worthless in some cases. We were the sole Empire. I don't think any of us had foreseen that. Probably a lot of people had, but I didn't know about it.

Salesman appeared in '49 in a country already starting to prosper, and to take a completely unforeseen path. The psychology of the audience was still that of depression people. The depression had only ended maybe ten years earlier, and people were on very shaky ground for the following ten years because of the war and the uncertainty as to how the country and the economy were going to go. I won't even mention our situation with Russia. The atmosphere was filled with uncertainty at the moment, but a growing prosperity. When considering the income of Willy Loman, we're talking about a world that already was disappearing. Indeed, I can tell you that I myself had difficulty at one point placing this play in its proper time. I kept being surprised by Biff's reference to being at war because it seemed to me later that this play had taken place before the war.

kullman: It is 1942 and then 1928. There is very little about the war in the play; and at this time the war must have been a major force in the lives of everyone.

miller: So it's already suspended in time, a little bit off the earth. It's not a documentary of a period and never tried to be. Consequently, it escaped a period feeling, I suppose, because I keep getting the same astonished report from people that it seems to have been written yesterday.

kullman: This past Sunday [15 September 1997], the New York Times ran an article about four young directors, all in their thirties, who are working with various Arthur Miller plays produced in New York during 1997; and they all explain why your plays work for them, but the article doesn't ask you.

miller: A mystery involved here. As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished.

kullman: Many viewers feel that they see something of their fathers as well as some of themselves in the character of Willy Loman. Willy seems to be a universal type, and his fate continues to fascinate us.

miller: Of course, I couldn't be more pleased that the play has endured. I think that if it is easy to understand why a play has endured, it won't endure. If you can explain it in two sentences, then it has the appearance of a rigid formula and falls apart. I think from the outset, from the day I wrote it, certainly from the day it was first performed, its temporal situation was already quite uncertain. It was to me anyway, and I think it was very quickly to a lot of people. The play ran a long time in New York, more than two years. Suddenly it was already 1951; and a whole new rage was blowing in the wind. The anti-communist tempest had begun. You wouldn't be writing such straightforward critical work about America after 1950. Indeed, I don't recall a single play that analyzed American capitalism as severely.

kullman: Even your own?

miller: Well, I did A View from the Bridge, and that had a side to it that was critical, and of course The Crucible was a head-on confrontation but such critiques were diminishing because America, the country, was on the defensive. And part of the defense was aggression. We struck back after being criticized.

kullman: You have a very good relationship with directors and actors, and you are helping the Signature Theater right now with their production of TheAmerican Clock. Did you have any influence on the actors who have played Willy Loman? Lee J. Cobb? George C. Scott? Dustin Hoffman? Any others?

miller: Well, not with George, because he worked completely apart from me and I had no input into that production. I am sorry to say that some of the casting wasn't very good. The Hoffman production I was very intimately involved in, right from the beginning. I thought that the production itself was very strong.

kullman: How bound by the text have various directors been? With Shakespeare's plays so much license is often taken.

miller: They haven't yet taken any license. They're waiting for me to die. As far as I am aware, they have been faithful to the text. Now, there was a film of Salesman made by a very good director Wim Wenders, a Swede. He eliminated the character of Ben, very foolishly; but he also did some other things that had nothing to do with the text. He made it very Swedish. The characters were very lugubrious. And, of course, I regard the play as having a lot of humor, which you couldn't tell from that performance.

kullman: I was surprised to read that when you wrote half of the play that first night you were laughing a lot of the time and speaking out loud to yourself.

miller: So much of what Willy thinks can lead you to laugh.

kullman: And teachers enjoy pointing out the many contradictions in Willy's thinking. Willy says one thing and then ten seconds later he says exactly the opposite. Students find that very amusing, too. It works just as well today as it did then. What about the character of Linda Loman? Today we hear so much about co-dependency, a term that probably wasn't around in 1948. Do you think it applies to her?

miller: Well, yes. It takes two to tango. She regards Willy as being very brittle, very easily destroyed; and she's got to prop him up or he'll collapse. In a way it's like someone who is dealing with a sick person. She's trying to keep bad news away from him lest he be destroyed by it.

kullman: Much is made of a comment he makes earlier that he's going to be a partner at the Wagner company. Then Ben asks him to come to Alaska with him, and Linda reminds him of his future at the company; truth or lie, we're not sure. But she keeps him back, at home. She's afraid to be adventuresome herself.

miller: At all costs she's got to shield him from the truth. She can insinuate the truth sometimes, but not too obviously. When he says, "You're my foundation and my support," that has a double meaning. She's a kind of co-dependent and heroine at the same time.

kullman: How about the boys, Biff and Happy? Robert Anderson says in I NeverSang for My Father something about a relationship not ending in death but continuing on after death in the life of the survivor. Do you think there's a chance that Biff will come to terms with who he is and accept his father for the person he was?

miller: I think so, as long as he is no longer threatened by him. Then he could possibly accept him as he was without accepting his values, seeing him as a tragic character, and a loving one too.

kullman: One of the most powerful scenes in the play is the climactic scene in the restaurant. When Happy denies his father, people in the audience sometimes gasp in horror; is there any kind of explanation for his behavior that makes him less a culprit and more of a victim?

miller: I don't know if you can explain it. He intends to win and be like his father. The same tragedy awaits Happy. It's going to be repeated in him and probably in his children.

kullman: Willy's friend Charley is always there assisting the Lomans in spite of constant rebuffs by Willy. He knows that Willy is resentful and jealous of him. And yet Charley is always there helping. He loves Willy. How can you explain that?

miller: Charley would probably drop him someday. But Willy is exciting. Charley's really very boring. He can sit there quietly for a long time without saying anything, and Willy's mind is always rolling all over the place. And that is a very attractive quality for a man like Charley whose mind goes direct to reality. Willy's personality is a counterpart to Charley's own personality. He often wishes he could be a little like Willy. All those contradictions that he recognizes in Willy-while Charley knows they're destructive and tells Willy, "You'd better grow up"-still there's something lovable in Willy because he is so vulnerable.

kullman: There's that lust for life, the zest, the imagination, the strength of this character that brings life of a strange sort to wherever he is.

miller: He's constantly thinking of the garden, of planting seeds. Of course, Charley admires Linda a lot. Part of his motive is to help her. Charley's simply being the guardian. Nobody in that house, in his opinion, can be depended upon to do anything; and they are relying on him even though they don't say so. Willy admits as much in his soliloquy where he says, "Charley's a man of few words, and people respect him." Charley knows that Willy envies him, and that's an ego pleasure. He knows that, in certain moods, Willy would much rather be Charley than himself.

kullman: The minor characters are important enough that none of them can be left out: Miss Forsythe; Stanley, the bartender-waiter; and Bernard. How do you feel about them today?

miller: They are exactly where they have to be because the story is very strong and they are firmly embedded in the story. What would you do without the waiter? He has more compassion for Willy at that moment than do the two sons. Each part is embedded in the other part. It's one unit, one articulated unit.

kullman: In 1947 Tennessee Williams's AStreetcar Named Desire came out, two years before Salesman. In Timebends you mention that Williams gave you the power to speak. What was your relationship with Williams, and did he influence Death of a Salesman?

miller: Yes. Tennessee's early plays were very realistic plays, very social. They were almost class-conscious plays. Not much is made of this, quite rightly, as they're not too interesting. So he had to struggle to find his own speech, and I had a parallel struggle. Most of the plays I wrote before All My Sons were rather expressionistic. They were not what you would call conventional realism. All My Sons was kind of a sport for me. It was a dollarly attempt to write a play that was acceptable. Both of us were unacceptable to the Broadway producer. The Glass Menagerie was not a conventional Broadway production. It came out of left field. It was unique at that time. The poetry was appealing. Our theater was bound by conventional realism. You could hardly tell who wrote any play. There were various attempts to break out of this situation. Maxwell Anderson tried to write in iambic pentameter and ended up with some museum pieces. Elmer Rice, way back in the early twenties, was writing Mr. Zero, an experimentally expressionistic work. Eugene O'Neill was fiddling with all kinds of forms to break out of the realistic tradition. This struggle, of course, goes back at least a hundred years in Europe-a whole school of them in France especially were writing very pedestrian language. It's the Irish who exploded things with J. M. Synge, who recognized that the main struggle at the turn of the century was to find a way to break the grip of street realism and to reintroduce the imagery of poets. A number of people, myself included, and obviously Tennessee, were struggling with this dilemma of how to hold an audience, to make them feel something with language that was not exactly familiar.

The first achievement of Tennessee's, one which really made a full step forward, was Menagerie rather than Streetcar. Streetcar was flashier, sexier, and more commercially successful because its story was more available to the audience. The fact that he found a unique voice that way was inspiring to me. He was a couple of years older and I felt I could go more in that direction with confidence. I had been fumbling for years to find my voice. I had wanted to write a play without transitions of any kind. There would be the direct thrust of the story from the first minute, each scene would be cut at its earliest moment, and succeeding scenes would begin at the latest possible moment. Salesman was built that way, and it had very little to do with Tennessee. What suddenly was encouraging to me was that nobody else could have written Streetcar. Here was a piece of writing that belonged to that author and not six others. You could hear a poet's voice in the theater again. I appreciated that.

kullman: I know you didn't have a strong relationship with William Inge, but for a while in the fifties the three of you were winning a good share of the theater awards. Did you have much contact with him?

miller: A little bit. He was so depressed as a person that it was very difficult to make any kind of contact with him. I'd see him and chat about this and that, but I got the feeling that he disliked and feared social occasions, at least the times that I met him, maybe four or five times. We never got into anything that was very deep. He just seemed to be fending off contact.

kullman: What about revisions? Tennessee Williams wrote Battle of Angels which became Orpheus Descending which became The Fugitive Kind. For a scholar doing research on Williams, this can be a nightmare. Which text does one use? When you finished Salesman in 1949, did you finish it entirely or were there rewrites?

miller: I made one change, as I recall. It appears in the restaurant scene during the dialogue between Biff and Willy, where Biff is telling some truths, some half-truths, and some outright lies about his adventures in seeing Oliver. The original text was so complicated that finally Arthur Kennedy turned to me and said, "I can't follow it myself." I said, "Just hang in there, do something else." So, I went home and that night I rewrote it. Simplified it.

kullman: How would you advise young playwrights who are trying to write about relationships between people?

miller: Get into another line of work. I don't know if any advice matters. These situations differ. Sometimes it's better for the playwright if he takes good advice, but how do you know what advice is good? Other times, he should stick to his guns. But that's more and more difficult because for the past century the position of the director has come to dominate the theater, whereas before that, at least in most cases, the writer was the dominant figure. It's very tricky. Consider Chekhov; the first performances of The Sea Gull were really quite disastrous. Stanislavsky didn't understand the play; he didn't understand that it was a comedy, an ironical play. And he damned near ruined that play forever. Chekhov could have reacted by trying to fix The Sea Gull to suit Stanislavsky's idea that it was dark, tragic, and so on. The truth is that the characters in that play are based on real people. This play was full of commentary about people alive at that time, and everyone knew who they were. It was, therefore, somewhat ruthless but also an affectionate play, a very brave attempt. I think at the time the convention was win, lose, or draw, the play is a play and it goes on as written. Ibsen made changes occasionally. He changed the ending of A Doll's House in Germany. Nora didn't leave. The Germans wouldn't stand for it. He either did that or he couldn't put the play on. The Germans were his biggest customers. The German theaters were his support. He couldn't live off twelve people coming into the theater in Norway. I don't know that his motives were gross. He was a director too. He started out as a kind of a director.

kullman: Have you ever made such a compromise?

miller: Well, I haven't had to, for one reason or another.

kullman: How would you explain your success with directors?

miller: I don't like to interfere while the director is working with actors. The reason is purely political. I think that actors ought to feel like there is a certainty in one's being directed. I don't want to break up the director's authority. Otherwise the actor will start to look to me. His allegiance will be divided. That's a bad thing to happen.

kullman: What was it like working with Elia Kazan?

miller: He was the best director that we've ever had that I know of. In Salesman and Streetcar, he was able to direct realistic psychology with an unrealistic surface, and that was his greatest strength during that time.

kullman: Is there anything you would like to say about why people should go to the theater today, or anything about politics and drama?

miller: Drama, any theater, is a manifestly, preeminently public art which exists in historical time. It prospers when the evolution of a society has reached a certain point. But we know politics is embedded in every work of significance. I don't understand why people try to separate these two elements. It's all one twine rope. You cannot separate them. I am not a Greek scholar, but I seem to recall that the Greeks referred to people who had no social sense as idiots, meaning the id was dominant in their thinking. That's what the word means. The caring for the fate of man, for the fate of their society, that it not evolve into some evil disorder, is implicit in all their great tragedies, or sometimes explicit. Oedipus is not only about the death of a father and mother. His disaster comes because there is a blight on his city which is killing people. It's not a soap opera about incest; it's a tragedy about the fate of a community. Hamlet is not just the son of a mother who is fooling around with a man who has murdered her husband. He's the prince of Denmark, and when it is said, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," it's to direct attention to the fact this country has to be governed. The politics of America is implicit in the whole of Salesman. The Salesman is close to being the universal occupation of contemporary society-not only in America, but everywhere. Everybody is selling and everything is for sale.

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Death of a Salesman at Fifty: An Interview with Arthur Miller

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Death of a Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theater in Philadelphia. In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller recalls that directly across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was performing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and the play's director, Elia Kazan, thought it might be a good idea to expose Lee J.

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Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Celebration

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By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 1998, and reprinted in Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going "He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back- that's an earthquake.

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ARTHUR MILLER's "Death of a Salesman," now on Broadway in a Tony-nominated revival - and starring a heart-shattering Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Willy Loman for the ages - is the most devastating portrait of punctured middle-class dreams in our national literature. Yet as I sat through a recent performance, I wondered why the play was revived at all.

While "Death of a Salesman" has consolidated its prestige as an exposure of middle-class delusions, the American middle class - as a social reality and a set of admirable values - has nearly ceased to exist.

Certainly few middle-class people, or at least anyone from any "middle class" that Loman would recognize, are among the audiences attending this production. What was once a middle-class entertainment has become a luxury item. Tickets for the original run, in 1949, cost between $1.80 and $4.80; tickets for the 2012 run range from $111 to $840. After adjusting for inflation, that's a 10-fold increase, well beyond the reach of today's putative Willy Lomans.

Then again, in 1949, the top marginal tax rate was 82 percent. The drop in that rate to 28 percent by 1988 helped create a stratum of people who could afford to pay high prices for everything from inflated theater tickets to health care and college tuition.

Ever tightening financial straits for the average American and the erosion of social safety nets have given the lie to now quaint values like hard work. Perhaps elite intellectuals like Mr. Miller himself unwittingly created an atmosphere hostile to such middle-class attitudes. Mr. Miller later wrote in his autobiography, "Timebends," that he had hoped the play would expose "this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last."

Yet "Salesman" is full of empathy for Willy. Mr. Miller remembered worrying in 1949 that "there was too much identification with Willy, too much weeping, and that the play's ironies were being dimmed out by all this empathy." He recalls with somber pride that the play's first director, Elia Kazan, "was the first of a great many men - and women - who would tell me that Willy was their father."

No wonder those first audiences' identification was so strong: they recognized Willy's search for humanity within his profit-driven job. Mr. Miller recalled that after performances during the play's first run, "some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping."

It's hard to imagine a similar reaction among audiences today. Not only have the industries that employed the salespeople, factory workers, middle managers and others in the plentiful, humbler realms of mid-20th-century capitalism begun to dry up, but today's capitalists no longer share Willy's belief that he could attain dignity through his work.

In 1949, Willy's desperate cry - "the competition is maddening!" - must have chilled theatergoers for whom competition still had a mostly positive connotation. In 2012, a fight to the death for shrinking opportunities in so many realms of life renders the idea of fair competition an anachronism. It is a sign of the times that sitcoms, in which trivial, everyday conflicts are comfortably resolved into neighborly harmony, are giving way to the Darwinian armageddons of reality TV. It is as if the middle class were being forced to watch the gladiatorial spectacle of its own destruction.

In our time of banker hustlers, real-estate hustlers and Internet hustlers, of suckers and "muppets," it is unlikely that anyone associates happiness and dignity with working hard for a comfortable existence purchased with a modest income. Even what's left of the middle class disdains a middle-class life. Everyone, rich, poor and in between, wants infinite pleasure and fabulous riches.

Mr. Miller's outrage at a capitalist system he wanted to humanize has become our cynical adaptation to a capitalist system we pride ourselves on knowing how to manipulate. For Mr. Miller, Willy's middle-class dreams put the system that betrayed them to shame. In our current context, Willy's dreams of love, dignity and community through modest work make him a deluded loser.

Perhaps there is a simple, unlovely reason "Death of a Salesman" has become such a beloved institution. Instead of humbling its audience through the shock of recognition, the play now confers upon the people who can afford to see it a feeling of superiority - itself a fragile illusion.

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Opinion | Death of a Salesman's Dreams (Published 2012)

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ARTHUR MILLER's "Death of a Salesman," now on Broadway in a Tony-nominated revival - and starring a heart-shattering Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Willy Loman for the ages - is the most devastating portrait of punctured middle-class dreams in our national literature.

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1.  Death of a Salesman and Death of a Salesman: The Swollen Legacy of Arthur Miller by BERT CARDULLO

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1.  Death of a Salesman and Death of a Salesman: The Swollen Legacy of Arthur Miller by BERT CARDULLO

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Introduction: Death in Two Senses
The immense international success of Death of a Salesman comes from the intellectual force of the play's central idea prevailing over the glaring defects of Arthur Miller's execution. But the relevance of this central idea, connected with door-to-door salesmen and the Darwinian nature of rampant capitalism, has withered with time and changing technology, and even if it hadn't, Miller still failed to craft a play befitting Salesman's exalted reputation.

While it's impossible to know his psychology enough to be sure, the shape of Salesman's flaws seem to suggest that Miller's artistic trouble stemmed from a divided personal impulse between making his play and his protagonist Jewish, and making them universal or representatively American. But whatever the case, the legacy questions inevitably following the playwright's recent death, make it time to take another look at his vaunted reputation, and pare it down to its rightful size: medium.
Section I: Compliments
Let's begin, however, with some of the reasons why the play continues to occupy the place it does in American drama and our national imagination. The very title Death of a Salesman both declares the significance of a salesman's death and finds value in its ordinary anonymity. This evocation is amplified by the opening sight of Willy Loman coming in the door. It's a superb image, an entrance as unforgettable and instantly iconic as Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and her wagon (another traveling salesman!). The salesman Willy is home. He is "tired to the death," lugging his two heavy sample cases, after having been rejected by the milk-filled bosom of the nation from which he had expected so much nourishment. The commodity he expected to sell is never identified because Willy is in a sense selling himself. He's a survivor of the early tradition of drummers in this country: men who viewed not their product but their personality as their chief ware, and still claimed they could sell anything.

Beyond the title and the entrance sequence, Miller's organizing idea keeps a fitful hold. It's the idea of the mid-century man, who has sold things without making them and paid for things without owning them. He exists as an insulted extrusion of commercial society battling for some sliver of authenticity before he slips into the great dark. And remarkably, he is battling without a real villain.

To his credit, Miller was one of the first writers to comprehend a seismic change in the American economy of the late 1940s that saw corporations expand into large, confusing bureaucracies. He depicts late capitalism in his play as having become impersonal and hierarchical; instead of class struggle, there is simple anomie.
Section II: Detriments
But to read or see Death of a Salesman again is to perceive how Arthur Miller lacked the control and vision to fulfill his own idea. First, consider the play's diction. The dialogue often slips away from a true first-generation Brooklyn Jewish and into a fanciness that is slightly ludicrous in context.

For example, to hear older son Biff say, "I've been remiss," or wife Linda say, "You're too accommodating, dear," or Willy himself declare that "There's such an undercurrent in him," is like watching a car run momentarily off the road and onto the shoulder.

The same goes for Miller's grammatical use of the nominative and accusative cases, as well as the subjunctive mood. The less-than-educated Lomans incongruously use the subjunctive "were" correctly, and unabashedly utter "I and Biff," "You and I," and "Biff and I" as if they were reading out of a school book. If the explanation is the Lomans merely aspire to speak in an educated manner—pretending, in keeping with their essential character, to be more book—learned than they are—Miller could have helped his cause by having his characters make the mistakes that almost all such strivers make, like using "I" when "me" is the grammatically correct form, as in the phrase "between you and me."

Thematically, too, Death of a Salesman is cloudy. The salesman figure that comes through is not of a typical grunt brought down by financial failure but of an exceptional invalid, in whom the stress of business only increased existing psychological imbalances.

Willy is shown to be at least as much a victim of psychopathy as of the bitch-goddess Success.

Evidence of Willy's psychopathy is so plentiful that it has led to his being diagnosed as manic-depressive, before the age of mood-leveling drugs, by Ben Brantley of the New York Times in a 1998 review of a Chicago-born, Broadway-bound revival of Death of a Salesman. Willy was subsequently diagnosed as "other-directed"—or possessing a value system entirely determined by external norms—from a sociological point of view by Walter Goodman in a 1999 Times column.

Indeed, Willy's self-contradictions go beyond normal human inconsistency into the realm of severe internal division. He yells at Biff: "Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!" But later adds: "Greatest thing in the world for him was to bum around."

And again: "Biff is a lazy bum!" says Willy. Then almost immediately thereafter: "And such a hard worker. There's one thing about Biff—he's not lazy."

Willy's memories of past conversations produce similar inconsistencies. One minute "Chevrolet . . . is the greatest car ever built;" the next, "That goddamn Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car." And, in consecutive sentences, Willy can declare the following without blinking: "I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, people don't seem to take to me."

Naturally, for someone like Willy, the past and the present duel with each other as well as with themselves. For example, he remembers saying that "the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead;" yet he perceives no inconsistency between that statement and this one in the present action of the play: "A man who can't handle tools is not a man."

He remembers telling Linda that "[People] seem to laugh at me." But he can tell his grown sons, "They laugh at me, huh? Go to Filene's, go to the Hub, go to Slattery's, Boston. Call out the name Willy Loman and see what happens!" And all of this from a man who has the unwitting nerve to wonder aloud, "Why am I always being contradicted?"
Section III: Psychology and Drama
But putting this mountain of Miller-provided evidence aside, let's assume for the sake of argument that Willy is not a psychopath. Instead, he was a relatively whole or normal man crushed by the American juggernaut. If we also consider Salesman from that angle, what is it's attitude toward that juggernaut and its business ideals? Such a question is crucial because there is no anagnorisis for Willy, nothing that suggests the play's attitude. There is no moment of recognition for him, let alone a great downfall: he dies believing in money.

In fact, he kills himself for money. Because he confuses materialistic success with a worthiness for love, he commits suicide to give his son Biff the insurance benefit as a stake for more business.

Willy's other son, Happy, is himself wedded to money values and says over his father's coffin that he's going to stick to them for his father's sake. Similarly, Biff was so aggrandized by his father that he became kleptomaniacal as a boy and even now, after his father-as-idol has collapsed, he can't resist stealing a successful businessman's fountain pen as a niggling revenge against that man's success and his own lack of it.

The only alternatives to the business ethos ever produced in Salesman are Willy's love of tools and seeds, building and planting, and Biff's love of the outdoor life. Miller confuses thematic matters even further by highlighting the successes of not only Dave Singleman, the gentlemanly eighty-four-year-old salesman who was Willy's inspiration (and who, according to Willy, died the regal "death of a salesman"), but also of young Bernard next door, a lawyer in the Establishment world with a wife and two sons. Bernard's is a deserved success for which Willy feels envy, as he does for the success of Bernard's father, Charley, who is also a good businessman with his own office and secretary.

Charley himself contributes to the confusion in Death of a Salesman. He can be heard endorsing Willy's view of himself when, during the play's Requiem, he says to Biff:
You don't understand: Willy was a salesman. And . . . a salesman . . . don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake. . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
However, in an Act II an attempt to puncture Willy's losing self-image, Charley had said almost the exact opposite to his next-door neighbor:
CHARLEY: . . . The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.
WILLY: I've always tried to think otherwise, I guess. I always felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked, that nothing—
CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? . . .
What is left in this play is neither a critique of the business world nor an adult vision of something different and better. Rather, it's the story of a man (granting he was sane) who failed as a salesman and father, and made things worse by refusing to admit those failures, which he knew to be true.
Section IV: Pathos, Tragedy, and Verism
That last sentence in the previous section certainly contains a play, and possibly a good one; but it is a quite a different play from Death of a Salesman, a work that implies in its atmosphere and mannerisms a radical perception of deep American ills.
The difference between Salesman as it is, and as it could have been, is the difference between pedestrian pathos and exalted tragedy. It's the difference between the destruction of a decent but unknowing man, and a great man, who simultaneously deserves, and does not deserve, his fate.
Ironically, Miller himself understood this distinction. His famous essay, "Tragedy and the Common Man," published in the New York Times in 1949 was a not-so-veiled argument for the tragic status of Salesman, in which he unwittingly described Willy Loman when he wrote,
Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witless- ness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.
Miller makes clear by the very title of his Times essay that he considers the common man to be as appropriate a subject for high tragedy as the royal leader. Yet modern writers have found it difficult to create powerful tragedies with workaday salesmen, let alone corporate executives, as protagonists.

There are at least two reasons for this:

First, for an audience to feel the full impact of the fate that the tragic hero brings on himself, the hero must have nearly complete freedom of action. In other words, the more the audience feels that the hero has been able to choose his course of action without restriction, the more emotionally moving his injurious choices.

Second, it is vital that the tragic hero's actions have some deep moral, spiritual, political, or philosophical significance for the whole of his society. This is why the classic dramatists generally dealt with protagonists whose lives were spent in a public arena—so much so that their every act or decision would have a direct effect on everyone around them.

By contrast, the unique pathos of the salesman lies in the fact that he has neither sufficient freedom of action nor demonstrable public significance. He is one of many just like himself, and unlike classical or neoclassical tragic protagonists, appears to have been conditioned passively and even gladly to accept the very conditions of life that will lead to his own annihilation.This is perhaps sad in the end, but it does not arouse the same kind of feeling as the classic tragedies.

A few additional points about the play, connected more with its verism than with its attempt at tragedy:

When I saw the 1952 film of Death of a Salesman, which made the play's environment more vivid, I couldn't help wondering why Willy had money worries. He had almost closed out the mortgage on his house, which to judge by the community development all around it was a piece of real estate in an increasingly valuable and desirable section of town. This is more than a petty literal point in a realistic play whose lexicon is bill-paying.

Finally, a point that is strangely more apparent now than it was likely to have been when Salesman first appeared in 1949: the drama is set in the late 1940s and reaches back some fifteen years to the early 1930s, yet there is scarcely a mention of the Great Depression—or of World War II? How did the Loman sons escape the war, and if they did, were they criticized or attacked for not serving in the military? If they didn't escape military service, wouldn't the reunited brothers have had something to say about it? About the Holocaust? And wouldn't the postwar economic boom itself have had some effect in the present on Willy's view of a promise-crammed America, not to speak of the Depression's effect in the past on Willy's view of that same America and his decreased earning power in it?
Section V: Flashbacks, Family, Judaism, and Christianity
The flashback structure of Death of a Salesman suggests something ominous about the play's quality as well, something connected with Miller's observed division between composing a Jewish domestic drama and writing a representative play on the American experience. Miller seems to have split the play twice: first, structurally, between a climactic frame of the last hours of Willy's life up, and an episodic form that enacts his past in a series of flashback scenes, and then psychologically, as a provisional equivalent for his own divided consciousness on the subject of a Jewish protagonist versus a Christian one.

With regard to the first cleave, who is to say that Willy's flashbacks are objectively true, as they are always assumed to be? Might they be the subjective or expressionistic visions of a feverish mind on the verge of collapse, instead of a mere device for explicating past events that the Lomans otherwise do not talk about? After all, this is a kind of memory play, and memory, even in a mentally healthy person, is notoriously fallible as well as selectively creative.

Furthermore, Willy's flashbacks could be his attempt to remember a pivotal year in his family's history—1931 or 1932, football star Biff's senior year of high school, during which he discovers his father's adulterous relationship with the woman in Boston, and when Willy purportedly turns down a job in Alaska working for his brother Ben—while also fictionalizing portions of his past. How else to explain why only Willy uses Ben's name or refers to the elder brother's South African business ventures, and only Willy refers to his boyhood wagon-travels West with his flute-carving father?

With regard to the second cleave, could the character Ben and the wagon-travels be Arthur Miller's inventive attempt to use Willy as a proxy for himself, Christianizing or universalizing his own past? It seems no coincidence that Miller was a real-life Jew whose three marriages were all to Christian women, and who never took the stance of a public Jewish intellectual during his long career.

In any case, a good portion of the material in Salesman is on Miller's favorite theme: the love-hate of a father and son. This material alone is still touching to read or watch.
Section VI: Looking Back in Bemusement
But, as in the case of the earlier compliments I paid the play, these are sound moments in a flabby, occasionally false, even schizoid work. Miller had gift enough to get the idea for Death of a Salesman, but then—in the face of his divided dramatic impulse—he settled for the dynamics of the idea itself to write his play. Miller's ongoing popularity depends on many viewers' and readers' taking the intent for the deed. But some never did, and others have stopped.

Looking ahead, I believe the latter two groups will ultimately prevail in determining the value of Death of a Salesman and Miller's career generally. It won't be the first time an artist's reputation has posthumously tanked. Several American playwrights, including Elmer Rice, Robert Sherwood, and Maxwell Anderson, had similarly large followings in the United States and abroad during their lives. Now those legacies are past the point of diminishment.

Miller has the largest international reputation of any American dramatist in our history, with the exception of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. But now that he has passed away, and is no longer present to "sell" himself, as it were, the small group of dissenters he had during his lifetime should begin to multiply. In their mind, there have always been two Millers: the great dramatist of popular opinion, and the much lesser, mostly middling one of their personal perspective. (The charter members of this minority, incidentally, were Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, Richard Gilman, and Stanley Kauffmann.)

So what made for Miller's undeserved glory in the first place?

Well, in foreign countries his language improves in translation—which, at its best, is a kind of rewriting—and in America his work has an uncanny ability to makes people feel they have undergone daring intellectual and spiritual expeditions when they have stayed cozily at home. In other words, Miller supplies the illusion of depth, endangerment, and enlightenment. He gives his audience a painlessly acquired feeling of superiority for having been present at his plays.

This is not to accuse Miller of cunning. He certainly always did his sincere best. After the Fall (1964) is tainted with a wriggly feeling of self-defense on account of some matters in his private life connected with his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communist infiltration of the arts. But usually the falseness that crops up in his work is of another sort. It's the peculiar falseness of honest writers who are not talented enough to keep free of contrived or misguided artistic means.

This is so much the case that going back to Salesman, Miller's most highly regarded work yet a relatively early one in his career, has been for me like going to the funeral of a man you wish you could have liked more. The occasion seals your opinion because you know there is no hope of change. Perhaps now that he is no longer around to sell and guard his own reputation, the "double" Miller will die away and only the mediocrity will remain.
Bert Cardullo is the film critic for The Hudson Review and the author of a number of articles and books on drama, including the forthcoming American Drama/Critics: Writings And Readings. He is spending the academic year 2005-2006 in Istanbul, Turkey, where he is a visiting professor of American studies.

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Introduction: Death in Two Senses The immense international success of Death of a Salesman comes from the intellectual force of the play's central idea prevailing over the glaring defects of Arthur Miller's execution.