Death of a Salesman

Table of Contents

 

 

PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

DEATH OF A SALESMAN

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include
All My Sons
(1947),
Death of a Salesman
(1949),
The Crucible
(1953),
A View from the Bridge
and
A Memory of Two Mondays
(1955),
After the Fall
(1964),
Incident at Vichy
(1965),
The Price
(1968),
The Creation of the World and Other Business
(1972), and
The American Clock
(1980). He has also written two novels,
Focus
(1945) and
The Misfits
, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for
In Russia
(1969),
Chinese Encounters
(1979), and
In the Country
(1977), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works include a memoir,
Mr. Peters’ Connections
(1999),
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944-2000
, and
On Politics and the Art of Acting
(2001).
Timebends
(1987), and the plays
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
(1991),
The Last Yankee
(1993),
Broken Glass
(1994). He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

 

 

Gerald Weales is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of
Religion in Modern English Drama
,
American Drama Since World War II
,
The Play and Its Parts
,
Tennessee Williams
,
The Jumping-Off Place
,
Clifford Odets
, and
Canned Goods as Caviar
:
American Film Comedy of the 1930s.
Mr. Weales is the editor of
Edwardian Plays
,
The Complete Plays of William Wycherley
, and The Viking Critical Library edition of Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible
. He has written a novel,
Tale for the Bluebird
, and two books for children. Mr. Weales won the George Jean Nathan Award for Drama Criticism in 1965.

BY ARTHUR MILLER

DRAMA

The Golden Years

The Man Who Had All the Luck

All My Sons

Death of a Salesman

An Enemy of the People (
adaptation of the play by Ibsen
)

The Crucible

A View from the Bridge

After the Fall

Incident at Vichy

The Price

The American Clock

The Creation of the World and Other Business

The Archbishop’s Ceiling

The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

Broken Glass

Mr. Peters’ Connections

 

ONE-ACT PLAYS

A View from the Bridge,
one-act version, with
A Memory of Two Mondays

Elegy for a Lady (
in
Two-Way Mirror)

Some Kind of Love Story (
in
Two-Way Mirror)

I Can’t Remember Anything (
in
Danger: Memory!)

Clara (
in
Danger: Memory!)

The Last Yankee

 

OTHER WORKS

Situation Normal

The Misfits (
a cinema novel
)

Focus (
a novel
)

I Don’t Need You Anymore (
short stories
)

In the Country (
reportage with Inge Morath photographs
)

Chinese Encounters (
reportage with Inge Morath photographs
)

In Russia (
reportage with Inge Morath photographs
)

Salesman in Beijing (
a memoir
)

Timebends (
autobiography
)

Homely Girl, A Life (
novella
)

 

COLLECTIONS

Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays (Volumes I and II)

The Portable Arthur Miller

The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (
Robert Martin, editor
)

 

VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS

Death of a Salesman (
edited by Gerald Weales
)

The Crucible (
edited by Gerald Weales
)

 

TELEVISION WORKS

Playing for Time

 

SCREENPLAYS

The Misfits

Everybody Wins

The Crucible

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by

The Viking Press 1949

Published in a Viking Compass Edition 1958

Published in Penguin Books 1976

This edition with an introduction by Christopher Bigsby published in

Penguin Books 1998

Copyright Arthur Miller, 1949 Copyright renewed Arthur Miller, 1977

Introduction copyright © Christopher Bigsby, 1998

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

 

Miller, Arthur, 1915 -

Death of a salesman/Arthur Miller; with an introduction by Christopher Bigsby.

p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)

eISBN : 978-1-101-04215-1

1. Sales personnel—United States—Drama. 2. Fathers and sons—

United States—Drama. I. Title. II. Series.

PS3525.I5156D41998

812’.52—dc21 97-37223

INTRODUCTION

The Depression of the 1930s seemed to break the promises America had made to its citizens. The stock market crash of 1929, it was assumed, ended a particular version of history: optimistic, confident. The American dream faded. And yet, not so. Myths as potent as that, illusions with such a purchase on the national psyche, are not so easily denied. In an immigrant society, which has, by definition, chosen to reject the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice. When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing. Arthur Miller knew this. When Charley, Willy Loman’s next-door neighbor, says that “a salesman is got to dream,” he sums up not only Willy’s life but a central tenet of his culture.

Death of a Salesman
is not set during the Depression but it bears its mark, as does Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old salesman, who stands baffled by his failure. Certainly in memory he returns to that period, as if personal and national fate were somehow intertwined, while in spirit, according to Miller, he also reaches back to the more expansive and confident, if empty, 1920s, when, according to a president of the United States, the business of America was business.
¹
And since he inhabits “the greatest country in the world,” a world of Manifest Destiny, where can the fault lie but in himself? If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself. No wonder Willy shouts out his name. He is listening for an echo. No wonder he searches desperately back through his life for evidence of the moment he took a wrong path; no wonder he looks to the next generation to give him back that life by achieving what had slipped so unaccountably through his own fingers.

Death of a Salesman
had its origins in a short story Miller wrote at the age of seventeen (approximately the age of the young Biff Loman), when he worked, briefly, for his father’s company. It told of an aging salesman who sells nothing, is abused by the buyers, and borrows his subway fare from the young narrator. In a note scrawled on the manuscript Miller records that the real salesman had thrown himself under a subway train. Years later, at the time of the play’s Broadway opening, Miller’s mother found the story abandoned in a drawer. But, as Miller has noted,
Death of a Salesman
also traced its roots closer to home.

Willy Loman was kin to Miller’s salesman uncle, Manny Newman, a man who was “a competitor, at all times, in all things, and at every moment. My brother and I,” Miller explains in his autobiography, “he saw running neck and neck with his two sons in some race that never stopped in his mind.” The Newman household was one in which you “dared not lose hope, and I would later think of it as a perfection of America for that reason. . . . It was a house . . . trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow.”
²

Manny’s son, Buddy, like Biff in Miller’s play, was a sports hero and, like Happy Loman, a success with the girls, but, failing to study, he never made it to college. Manny’s wife, meanwhile, “bore the cross of reality for them all,” supporting her husband, “keeping up her calm, enthusiastic smile lest he feel he was not being appreciated.” (123) It is not hard to see this woman honored in the person of Linda Loman, Willy’s loyal but sometimes bewildered wife, who is no less a victim than the husband she supports in his struggle for meaning and absolution.

Though Miller spent little time with Manny, “he was so absurd, so completely isolated from the ordinary laws of gravity, so elaborate in his fantastic inventions . . . so lyrically in love with fame and fortune and their inevitable descent on his family, that he possessed my imagination.” (123) To drop by the Newman family home, Miller explains, was “to expect some kind of insinuation of my entire life’s probable failure, even before I was sixteen.” (124) Bernard, son of Willy’s next-door neighbor, was to find himself treated in much the same way by the Lomans.

There is, however, something more than absurdity about such people as Manny, who managed to sustain their faith in the face of evidence to the contrary. Of a salesman friend of Manny, Miller writes, “Like any traveling man he had to my mind a kind of intrepid valor that withstood the inevitable putdowns, the scoreless attempts to sell. In a sense, these men lived like artists, like actors whose product is first of all themselves, forever imagining triumphs in a world that either ignores them or denies their presence altogether. But just often enough to keep the game going one of them makes it and swings to the moon on a thread of dreams unwinding out of himself.” (127) And, surely, Willy Loman himself is just such an actor, a vaudevillian, getting by “on a smile and a shoeshine,” staging his life in an attempt to understand its plot and looking for the applause and success he believes to be his due. He wants, beyond anything, to be “well liked,” for, without that, he fears he will be nothing at all.

During the run of his first great success,
All My Sons
, Miller met Manny again. Rather than comment on the play, his uncle answered a question he had not been asked: “Buddy is doing very well.” The undeclared competition was still under way, as if time had stood still. The chance meeting made Miller long to write a play that would recreate the feeling that this encounter gave him, a play that would “cut through time like a knife through a layer of cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers, and instead of one incident in one time-frame succeeding another, display past and present concurrently, with neither one ever coming to a stop.” (131) For in that one remark Manny brought together past hopes and present realities while betraying an anxiety that hinted at a countercurrent to his apparent confidence.