Essays on Death of a Salesman

February 10, 1949

Arthur Miller

Play

Tragedy

Willy Loman, Linda Loman, Biff Loman, Happy Loman, Ben Loman, Bernard, Charley, The Woman, Howard

Mythic figures, the American West, Alaska, the African jungle,Seed, diamonds, Linda’s and The Woman’s stockings, the rubber hose

The American Dream, the anatomy of truth, and infidelity.

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!”
“I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have - to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.”
“And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ’Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?”
“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit!”

The play premiered on Broadway in February 1949 and ran for 742 performances.
The play has been adapted for cinema ten times.
The play Death of a Salesman won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play.