Arthur Miller was born in
New York City on October 17, 1915. His career
as a playwright began while he was a student at the University of
Michigan. Several of his early works won prizes, and during his
senior year, the Federal Theatre Project in Detroit performed one
of his works. He produced his first great success, All My
Sons, in 1947. Two years later,
Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, which won the Pulitzer
Prize and transformed Miller into a national sensation. Many critics
described Death of a Salesman as the first great American tragedy,
and Miller gained eminence as a man who understood the deep essence
of the United States. He published The Crucible in 1953,
a searing indictment of the anti-Communist hysteria that pervaded 1950s
America. He has won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award twice,
and his Broken Glass (1993)
won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season.
Death of a Salesman, Miller’s
most famous work, addresses the painful conflicts within one family,
but it also tackles larger issues regarding American national values.
The play examines the cost of blind faith in the American Dream.
In this respect, it offers a postwar American reading of personal
tragedy in the tradition of Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle.
Miller charges America with selling a false myth constructed around
a capitalist materialism nurtured by the postwar economy, a materialism
that obscured the personal truth and moral vision of the original
American Dream described by the country’s founders.
A half century after it was written, Death of
a Salesman remains a powerful drama. Its indictment of
fundamental American values and the American Dream of material success
may seem somewhat tame in today’s age of constant national and individual
self-analysis and criticism, but its challenge was quite radical
for its time. After World War II, the United States faced profound
and irreconcilable domestic tensions and contradictions. Although
the war had ostensibly engendered an unprecedented sense of American
confidence, prosperity, and security, the United States became increasingly embroiled
in a tense cold war with the Soviet Union. The propagation of myths
of a peaceful, homogenous, and nauseatingly gleeful American golden
age was tempered by constant anxiety about Communism, bitter racial
conflict, and largely ignored economic and social stratification.
Many Americans could not subscribe to the degree of social conformity
and the ideological and cultural orthodoxy that a prosperous, booming,
conservative suburban middle-class championed.
Uneasy with this American milieu of denial and discord,
a new generation of artists and writers influenced by existentialist
philosophy and the hypocritical postwar condition took up arms in
a battle for self-realization and expression of personal meaning.
Such discontented individuals railed against capitalist success
as the basis of social approval, disturbed that so many American
families centered their lives around material possessions (cars,
appliances, and especially the just-introduced television)—often
in an attempt to keep up with their equally materialistic neighbors.
The climate of the American art world had likewise long been stuck
in its own rut of conformity, confusion, and disorder following
the prewar climax of European Modernism and the wake of assorted
-isms associated with modern art and literature. The notions of
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung regarding the role of the human subconscious
in defining and accepting human existence, coupled with the existentialist
concern with the individual’s responsibility for understanding one’s existence
on one’s own terms, captivated the imaginations of postwar artists
and writers. Perhaps the most famous and widely read dramatic work
associated with existentialist philosophy is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot. Miller fashioned a particularly American version
of the European existentialist stance, incorporating and playing
off idealistic notions of success and individuality specific to the
United States.
The basis for the dramatic conflict in Death of
a Salesman lies in Arthur Miller’s conflicted relationship
with his uncle, Manny Newman, also a salesman. Newman imagined a
continuous competition between his son and Miller. Newman refused
to accept failure and demanded the appearance of utmost confidence
in his household. In his youth, Miller had written a short story
about an unsuccessful salesman. His relationship with Manny revived
his interest in the abandoned manuscript. He transformed the story
into one of the most successful dramas in the history of the American
stage. In expressing the emotions that Manny Newman inspired through
the fictional character of Willy Loman, Miller managed to touch
deep chords within the national psyche.
