Life & Background
Miller was born in New York in 1915 to a Jewish family whose clothing business was destroyed by the Wall Street Crash, an event that shaped his lifelong concern with work, debt, and the promises capitalism makes. He worked in a warehouse to pay for the University of Michigan and began writing plays there. All My Sons in 1947 and Death of a Salesman in 1949 established him. He wrote The Crucible in 1953 as a response to the anti-communist investigations of the period, and in 1956 was himself called before the House Un-American Activities Committee; he refused to name others and was convicted of contempt of Congress, a conviction later overturned. He was married to Marilyn Monroe from 1956 to 1961. He continued writing and campaigning for imprisoned writers through PEN until his death in 2005.
Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman, a travelling salesman of sixty-three, comes home exhausted, unable to keep his car on the road. He has been taken off salary and works on commission; his sons Biff and Happy have not become what he promised they would be. The play moves between the present and Willy's memories, in which the boys are young and full of promise and his brother Ben appears as a figure of success walking into the jungle and coming out rich. Biff, who once idolised his father, discovered him with a woman in a Boston hotel room and has drifted since. Willy is fired by the son of his old boss. After a final confrontation in which Biff insists they are both ordinary men, Willy drives off and kills himself so that Biff will receive the insurance money. At the funeral almost nobody comes.
Miller argued in his essay Tragedy and the Common Man that the tragic hero need not be highborn, since the essential ingredient is a character's readiness to lay down his life to secure his sense of personal dignity — and Willy is the demonstration. The play's structure abolishes flashback in the conventional sense: past scenes intrude into the present on the same set, so that memory is staged as simultaneous rather than sequential, which is Jo Mielziner's design as much as Miller's script. The critique is economic as well as psychological, since Willy has internalised a promise about being well liked that the system never intended to keep, and his death is a transaction. Critics have divided over whether the play is genuinely tragedy or, as Raymond Williams argued, a form better described as social drama.
Why Miller Matters
Death of a Salesman is the central American play about work, family, and failure, and Miller's essay on common-man tragedy is a standard theoretical reference in drama papers. The Crucible made the Salem witch trials a permanent allegory for political persecution, and Miller's own refusal to name names before HUAC gives the play unusual biographical weight. With Williams and O'Neill he forms the trio through which mid-century American theatre is taught.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- All My Sons1947
- Death of a Salesman1949
- The Crucible1953
- A View from the Bridge1955
- After the Fall1964
- The Price1968
- Timebends (memoir)1987