Background to Death of a Salesman

Background to Death of a Salesman
INTRODUCTION

America has long been known as a land of opportunity. Out of that thinking comes the
“American Dream,” the idea that anyone can ultimately achieve success, even if he or
she began with nothing.

In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, we follow Willy Loman as he reviews a life of
desperate pursuit of a dream of success. In this classic drama, the playwright suggests
to his audience both what is truthful and what is illusory in the American Dream and,
hence, in the lives of millions of Americans.

Unusual in its presentation of a common man as a tragic figure, the play received the
Pulitzer Prize as well as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award when it was
produced and published in 1949. About the writing of the play, Miller says, “I wished to
create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s
way of mind.” To accomplish this Miller uses the sense of time on stage in an
unconventional way to illustrate that, for Willy Loman, “…the voice of the past is no
longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.” Although he denies any
direct intent to make a political statement about the capitalist way of life in the United
States, Miller brings the American Dream onto the stage for evaluation.
PREPARING TO READ
Arthur Miller Biography

Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist, and a controversial figure in
the twentieth-century American theater. He was a well-known and renowned playwright,
essayist, and figure of the 20th century.

Among his most popular plays are All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and
A View from the Bridge. He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work
on The Misfits.

He passed away on February 10, 2005.

Death of a Salesman Background

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller’s personal
experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. The play
recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial element,
reducing most plot to the confines of the nuclear family. Death of a Salesman focuses
on two sons who are estranged from their father, paralleling one of Miller’s other major
works, All My Sons, which premiered two years before Death of a Salesman.

Although the play premiered in 1949, Miller began writing Death of a Salesman at the
age of seventeen when he was working for his father’s company. In short story form, it
treated an aging salesman unable to sell anything. He is berated by company bosses
and must borrow subway change from the young narrator. The end of the manuscript
contains a postscript, noting that the salesman on which the story is based had thrown
himself under a subway train.

Arthur Miller reworked the play in 1947 upon a meeting with his uncle, Manny Newman.
Miller’s uncle, a salesman, was a competitor at all times and even competed with his
sons, Buddy and Abby. Miller described the Newman household as one in which one
could not lose hope, and based the Loman household and structure on his uncle and
cousins. There are numerous parallels between Abby and Buddy Newman and their
fictional counterparts, Happy and Biff Loman: Buddy, like Biff, was a renowned high
school athlete who ended up flunking out. Miller’s relationship to his cousins parallels
that of the Lomans to their neighbor, Bernard.

While constructing the play, Miller was intent on creating continuous action that could
span different time periods smoothly. The major innovation of the play was the fluid
continuity between its segments. Flashbacks do not occur separate from the action but
rather as an integral part of it. The play moves between fifteen years back and the
present, and from Brooklyn to Boston without any interruptions in the plot.

Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway in 1949, starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy
Loman and directed by Elia Kazan (who would later inform on Arthur Miller in front of
the House Un-American Activities Committee). The play was a resounding success,
winning the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Tony Award for Best Play. The New Yorker
called the play a mixture of “compassion, imagination, and hard technical competence
not often found in our theater.” Since then, the play has been revived numerous times
on Broadway and reinterpreted in stage and television versions. As an archetypal
character representing the failed American dream, Willy Loman has been interpreted by
diverse actors such as Fredric March (the 1951 film version), Dustin Hoffman (the 1984
Broadway revival and television movie), and, in a Tony Award-winning revival, Brian
Dennehy.

Plays are written to be performed, not read.
The dialogue of a dramatic play is best
“heard” with your ears and not ‘seen” on a
page.

There are many performances of the play – here is one version.

To watch/hear
Death of a Salesman, open this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMqiCtq5VLs

From China – open this Link: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1jIUxCW955f_SRqQYBTxdUQ
PW: ew3e

To SUBMIT AT THE END OF THE UNIT
As you watch and read through the play, stop occasionally to record your thoughts,
reactions, and concerns in a Response Journal.

Your journal may be a separate notebook or individual sheets which you clip together
and keep in a folder.

Include statements about the characters—what you learn about them, how they affect
you—and your thoughts about the key issues and events which the play explores.

Also, jot down questions you have about events and statements in the play which you
do not understand.

Your Response Journal will come in handy when you discuss the play in class, write a
paper, or explore a related topic that interests you.

Evaluation will be based on evidence of thought in your journal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMqiCtq5VLs

https://pan.baidu.com/s/1jIUxCW955f_SRqQYBTxdUQ

Arthur Miller Biography
Death of a Salesman Background