Death of a Salesman (Penguin Plays)

The tragedy of Loman the all-American dreamer and loser works eternally, on the page as on the stage. A lot of plays made history around 1949, but none have stepped out of history into the classic canon as Salesman has. Great as it was, Tennessee Williams's work can't be revived as vividly as this play still is, all over the world. (This edition has edifying pictures of Lee J. Cobb's 1949 and Brian Dennehy's 1999 performances.) It connects Aristotle, The Great Gatsby, On the Waterfront, David Mamet, and the archetypal American movie antihero. It even transcends its author's tragic flaw of pious preachiness (which undoes his snoozy The Crucible, unfortunately his most-produced play).

No doubt you've seen Willy Loman's story at least once. It's still worth reading. --Tim Appelo

Product Description
The tragedy of a typical American--a salesman who at the age of sixty-three is faced with what he cannot face; defeat and disillusionment.

The story is about a broken-hearted salesman, Willy Loman. He is a man no longer living in the real world but is mostly trapped in his own delusional world. He can't let go of the past no matter how hard he tries, and it's eating him up inside. He wants to believe that his family is a shoe-in for greatness, no matter how lonely and sad his wife is, or how much of a player/swinger his youngest son is, or how confused and anti-business his oldest son is. You put all of this together and you get a glimpse of an American tragedy that is so powerful and sad that it makes you think these things happen all the time. From Page 1 you know it's not going to end on a happy note, but you decide to take the path anyways. And a path worth taking it is.

I admit that I was confused at certain points, because through the text alone it is very hard to separate Willy's reality from his imagination. There are places where Willy departs from reality and goes back to the past and it makes it very hard for us to figure out what is going on if we're only reading it. When I saw the movie version after reading this, I was able to appreciate the play more. I understood what confused me and I was able to figure out what was happening. Despite some confusing moments it is still a tremendous play that is very involving from start to finish. You are able to sympathize with the main character, and with the rest of the characters as well. You know a writer has done the job right when you are able to feel or care for every single character (or at least almost all of them, being there will be a few minor characters you're really not supposed to care for that much. This is something that always happens in the world of fiction and is to be expected). Arthur Miller did an amazing job of writing such a realistic and emotionally driven play. The characters were realistic as well as the dialogue.

"Death of a Salesman" is more than just simply a stunning play; it is a beautiful portrait of a family dealing with hardships and troubles. As soon as I began the play I was unable to put it down until it was finished. If you want to read a great play and are interested in great works of drama, this is the one for you.

(Note: If you are confused by the play, see the movie afterwards. It really helps.)


Great American Tragedy   March 8, 2003
C. Middleton (Australia)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful

On ~Salesman's~ first opening night, when the curtain dropped at the end of the performance, something strange occurred, something that had never been seen before in American theatre: the audience, a full house, did not applaud, but sat motionlesss in their seats in silence. As minutes passed, a few people stood up to put on their coats, but sat down again, turning and discussing their lives. This strange behaviour continued on for some hours. Miller sat backstage, his head in his hands, not wanting to confront the possibility that his play had been a flop - this was far from the case, ~Salesman~ was a runnaway hit, and continues to be the emblematic portrayal of personal tragedy combined with cultural crises.

~Salesman~ is about many things. It is a tragedy about the collapse of the notion that personal success is measured by one's financial prosperity. Willy Loman's tragedy is really two-fold: the need of most people to make a 'mark' in their lives either through financial success or merely being loved by one's friends and family. In the end, Loman comes to realize his son Biff loves him; however, ironically, this realization only propounds his material failure which consequently, leads to his final attempt at 'success', ending in his tragic suicide.

This superlative play is a dramatic lesson in the individual tragedy of a man pursuing materialistic success at the expense of the higher values of personal, emotional growth and fulfillment that can only be achieved by truly knowing oneself.

~Salesman~ is a moralistic play. It teaches us that Willy Loman is Everyman. We're all part of a system that pushes the lie that materialism measures the worth of people, but to exclude basic human values, knowledge, community, and love, is to court disaster, and in poor Willy Loman's case, self destruction.

This play is the great American tragedy and a valuable lesson for us all.


Success   April 2, 2000
Trine Anette (Bodo, Norway)
22 out of 26 found this review helpful

Death of a salesman is a play written by Arthur Miller (1915- ). The play focuses on how Willy Loman, the main character always thinks and talks about being successful. Being successful is Willy's great dream. Just like the American dream. Willy strives to bring happiness to himself and his family, but does not succeed. He is too prideful to accept the fact that his dream of being a successful salesman never will become true, and he is too prideful to accept where he fits in society. People like Willy are very common in today's society. They are caught up in the American dream; everybody wants to be successful, but only a few make it to the top. But is this really the most important values in life? Willy looks at himself as a failure, just because he didn't make it to the top in business life, well, that is how business is; not everybody can make it to the top. That doesn't necessarily mean that your whole life is over. That is what happened to Willy; when he felt like a failure because of his broken dream, he let it out on his wife, and his two sons, Biff and Happy. Then he killed himself. This shows that Willy's only values in life were to become wee-liked and successful and if he didn't, it wasn't worth living. I think the book was a bit difficult to read, because the play shifts between present and past, which makes it a bit confusing. All over, I liked the book, not because the story was so good, but because after finishing it, it made me think about how much people think about their career, and how often the career becomes a first priority, no matter what. Is it the career that makes a man successful?


Rat Race Lost, State of Denial   March 31, 2008
H. Schneider (wechselhaft)
19 out of 20 found this review helpful

Hopeless fathers & sons were a favorite theme of Miller. The pressure of failing aspirations. The horror of failure. Drawn between overconfidence and self-doubt. Flashbacks on scenes from a dreary life. Lies to others and oneself. Failures in job and family.
The play is one of the quintessential pieces of modern American theater. Its themes are known and have been expounded endlessly. Why is it still fresh? I have never watched it on stage nor screen. I have known it for ages, but could not find enough interest to look for a performance, nor to read it. Now LoA does it.
Looking at the reviews here on the Penguin modern classic page, I am wondering about the spread in reviews. From 5 to 1 stars all is there, with a downward slope towards the negative votes. The play has more friends than foes, but on an absolute level, the nays would sink an ordinary ship. Of course quality questions are not decided by democracy. One particularly daft observer produced a perfect inverted version of cultural Stalinism. With perfect perverted logic, he tells us that only positive depictions of the American dream are acceptable. That is completely in line with 'socialist realism': if the artist fails to enthuse about the reigning system, he is condemned.
Thanks to LoA for making me get to know the man Miller. I will definitely look for a movie version or go to a play if I find an opportunity.


no attention should be paid   November 4, 2001
Orrin C. Judd (Hanover, NH USA)
18 out of 39 found this review helpful

Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the
paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is
happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old
dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person
-Linda Loman, Act 1, Death of a Salesman

Why must attention be paid? Since the play's debut, amazingly over 50 years ago now, that has been the central question : must we pay attention to the demise of Willy Loman? Even Willy's name seems to be a gauntlet thrown down in the face of the critics. Where traditional tragedy deals with the high born, the fall of royalty, Arthur Miller quite consciously structures his drama around the fall of a lowly man, a two-bit salesman. But the answer to the question, as is so often the case, is all in how you ask it.

You see, if the question is, can the life and death of a salesman be tragic?, then, of course, the answer is yes it can. Nor does it require that he be a "great" man, but it does require that he be a good man. The problem with trying to imbue this play with the aura of tragedy is not that Willy Loman is a little man, it's that he's not a good man : he's not much of a salesman; he cheats on his wife; he lives vicariously and unfairly through his eldest son, Buck, then makes excuses for that son's pathological misbehavior; he virtually ignores his second son; he's a real bastard to friends, neighbors and extended family; and so on. Perhaps I missed something, but what quality is it in Willy that should make us regret his departure?

Arthur Miller, who is one of the last unrepentant Marxists, obviously sees Willy as a victim of capitalism. Willy has bought into the American Dream and it has destroyed him; after a lifetime of toil in the system, he is being disposed of now that he is no longer productive. The problem with this is that, much like Jay Gatsby (see Orrin's review), Willy has simply failed to understand the promise of that dream. He believes that the recipe for success is to be "impressive" and "well-liked" and for your children to be identical to you in manner and aspiration. Toward that end, he is all back-slapping, forced humor, pretense, and bluster and he demands the same of his poor benighted sons. One doesn't really expect an intellectual to have any real understanding of economics (or much else for that matter) but Miller, in reducing capitalism to nothing more than a kind of cheap hucksterism, has followed in the footsteps of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the like, with equally obtuse results.

It is the genius of capitalism that chaff like the Loman's are ruthlessly winnowed. Willy and his sons are so transparently phony it makes your flesh crawl just listening to them. It's not as if Willy had been steadily advancing through the business world and then suddenly hit the wall. He's spent forty years on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder for a reason. That reason?, he has been judged inadequate, long before his age caught up to him. This is a man who should have been a gym teacher and an athletics coach. But not only has he deluded himself and ignored forty years of messages from the system, he also insists that his sons follow in his clearly misguided footsteps.

It is perhaps most instructive to compare Willy Loman to George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. George is a truly talented young man who yearns to escape his hometown and put his skills to use elsewhere. A series of external circumstances intervene and he never gets out, but he does build a vital local business, has a loving family and myriad friends. Facing economic ruin, through no fault of his own, he despairs that he's worth more dead than alive, but realizes, with the help of a guardian angel, that he's helped hundreds of people and that his selflessness has had a profound effect on those around him. He decides not to commit suicide and throngs of friends and customers turn up to help him out of his fix. He's really had a wonderful life.

The narrative structure of Death of a Salesman is even similar, though Miller, perhaps unwisely, eschews the angel. But as Willy looks back over his life, he sees, not a series of charitable acts, but a series of selfish acts. When Willy finally does kill himself, there are hardly any mourners, and one has to ask whether even those who are there won't be better off with him gone.

This play is really a relic of the short, unhappy period in the 30's and 40's when American intellectuals had been seduced by Marxism. It is too doctrinaire in it's assumptions about democracy and capitalism to actually say anything of lasting value. You know how there are periodic attempts to ban the teaching of certain books in public schools? Well, I had teachers who taught both this play and The Crucible, that equally morally flaccid piece of tripe and let me just say this : as a parent, I just don't want some nitwit teacher trying to explain this Stalinist propaganda to my kids and telling them that it offers some kind of profound analysis of our society. If folks think it's important to expose kids to authors who critique capitalism and the American Dream, at least let them read The Great Gatsby, which, though wrong also, is at least great literature.

GRADE : F