Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller (1949)
“The most devastating autopsy of the American Dream ever staged — a salesman who sold himself a lie and couldn't stop paying for it.”
At a Glance
Over two days in the late 1940s, aging salesman Willy Loman unravels. Unable to distinguish past from present, he relives the moment his son Biff discovered his adultery in a Boston hotel room — the betrayal that destroyed their relationship and Biff's future. Convinced he's worth more dead than alive, Willy drives into the night and crashes his car, leaving Biff and Happy to bury a man who died still believing the wrong things.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway in February 1949 and ran for 742 performances. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award simultaneously — the first play to do so. It has never been out of print and has been translated into every major language. It is the most-produced serious American play in the world, performed in China and Japan as readily as in the United States, because the American Dream it autopsies has been exported everywhere the American century reached.
Diction Profile
Working-class Brooklyn cadence in dialogue; fragmented, interrupted, trailing off. Elevated only in Linda's thesis speech and Charley's elegy.
Moderate