Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman is sixty-three years old and has been on the road selling for most of his life. He comes home to Brooklyn one night unable to keep the car on the road, and over the next twenty-four hours the story he has told himself — that he is well liked, that his sons are destined for greatness, that success is owed to charm — comes apart in his hands.
Arthur Miller's play moves without warning between the present and Willy's memory, so the young Biff and Happy of the back yard share the stage with the men they have become: Biff, the high-school football star now drifting between ranch jobs, and Happy, comfortable, hollow and always a step behind his brother. Linda watches all of it and protects her husband from everyone, including himself. Around them stand the people Willy measures himself against and cannot forgive — his neighbour Charley, who quietly keeps him solvent; Charley's son Bernard, once the boy Willy pitied; Howard Wagner, the young employer who inherited him; and the vision of his brother Ben, who walked into the jungle and came out rich.
First staged at the Morosco Theatre in February 1949 and published by Viking the same year, Death of a Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. Miller subtitled it "Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem," and it remains the most durable American argument about what a life is worth when it is measured only in what it sold.
A travelling salesman of sixty-three, exhausted and no longer able to sell, who has built his life on being well liked.
The elder son, a high-school football star who never settled into work, and the one person who knows why.
The younger son, who has a job, an apartment and his father's habit of overstating both.
Willy's wife, who sees his decline clearly and defends him against their sons and against himself.
Willy's neighbour, who lends him money every week and offers him a job he will not take.