Arthur Miller
I. Introduction to Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an
American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure
in American theatre and cinema for almost 100 years, writing a
wide variety of dramas, including celebrated plays such as The
Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a
Salesman, which are studied and performed worldwide. Miller
was often in the public eye, most famously for refusing to give
evidence against others to the House Un-American Activities
Committee, being the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
among countless other awards, and for his marriage to Marilyn
Monroe. Miller is considered by audiences and scholars as one
of America's greatest playwrights and his plays are lauded
throughout the world.
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
Arthur Miller was born in New York. His father, Isidore Miller,
was a ladies-wear manufacturer and shopkeeper who was ruined
in the depression. The sudden change in fortune had a strong
influence on Miller. "This desire to move on, to metamorphose?
or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary ?was given me as
life's inevitable and righful condition," he wrote in TIMEBENDS:
A LIFE (1987). The family moved to a small frame house in
Brooklyn, which is said to the model for the Brooklyn home in
Death of a Salesman. Miller spent his boyhood playing foorball
and baseball, reading adventure stories, and appearing generally
as a nonintellectual. "If I had any ideology at all it was what I
had learned from Hearst newspapers," he once said. After
graduating from a high school in 1932, Miller worked in
automobile parts warehouse to earn money for college. Having
read Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov Miller decided
to become a writer. To study journalism he entered the University
of Michigan in 1934, where he won awards for playwriting and
one of the other awarded playwright was Tennessee Williams.
After graduating in English in 1938, Miller returned to New
York. There he joined the Federal Theatre Project, and wrote
scripts for radio programs, such as Columbia Workshop (CBS)
and Cavalcade of America (NBC). Because of a football injury,
he was exempt from draft. In 1940 Miller married a Catholic
girl, Mary Slattery, his college sweetheart, with whom he had
two children. Miller's first play to appear on Broadway was
THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE THE LUCK (1944). It
closed after four performances. Three years later produced
ALL MY SONS was about a factory owner who sells faulty
aircraft parts during World War II. It won the New York Drama
Critics Circle award and two Tony Awards. In 1944 Miller
toured Army camps to collect background material for the
screenplay THE STORY OF GI JOE (1945). Miller's first
novel, FOCUS (1945), was about anti-Semitism.
Miller's plays often depict how families are destroyed
by false values. Especially his earliest efforts show
his admiration for the classical Greek dramatists.
"When I began to write," he said in an interview, "one
assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream
that began with Aeschylus and went through about
twenty-five hundred years of playwriting." (from The
Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, ed. by
Christopher Bigsby, 1997)
II. Death of A Salesman
DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949) brought Miller international fame, and
become one of the major achievements of modern American theatre. It relates
the tragic story of a salesman named Willy Loman, whose past and present
are mingled in expressionistic scenes. Loman is not the great success that he
claims to be to his family and friends. The postwar economic boom has
shaken up his life. He is eventually fired and he begins to hallucinate about
significant events from his past. Linda, his wife, believes in the American
Dream, but she also keeps her feet on the ground. Deciding that he is worth
more dead than alive, Willy kills himself in his car ?hoping that the insurance
money will support his family and his son Biff could get a new start in his life.
Critics have disagreed whether his suicide is an act of cowardice or a last
sacrifice on the altar of the American Dream.
WILLY: I'm not interested in stories about the past or any crap
of that kind because the woods are burning, boys, you
understand? There's a big blaze going on all around. I was
fired today.
BIFF (shocked): How could you be?
WILLY: I was fired, and I'm looking for a little good news to
tell your mother, because the woman has waited and the
woman has suffered. The gist of it is that I haven't got a story
left in my head, Biff. So don't give me a lecture about facts and
aspects. I am not interested. Now what've you got so say to me?
(from Death of a Salesman)
III. The Crucible
In 1949 Miller was named an "Outstanding Father of the Year", which
manifested his success as a famous writer. But the wheel of fortune was going
down. In the 1950s Miller was subjected to a scrutiny by a committee of the
United States Congress investigating Communist influence in the arts. The FBI
read his play The Hook, about a militant union organizer, and he was denied a
passport to attend the Brussels premiere of his play THE CRUCIBLE (1953). It
was based on court records and historical personages of the Salem witch trials
of 1692. In Salem one could be hanged because of ''the inflamed human
imagination, the poetry of suggestion.'' The daughter of Salem's minister falls
mysteriously ill. Reverend Samuel Parris is a widower, and there is very little
good to be said for him. He believes he is persecuted wherever he goes.
Rumours of witchcraft spread throughout the people of Salem. "The times, to
their eyes, must have been out of joint, and to the common folk must have
seemed as insoluble and complicated as do ours today." The minister accuses
Abigail Williams of wrongdoing, but she transforms the accusation into plea for
help: her soul has been bewitched. Young girls, led by Abigail, make
accusations of witchcraft against townspeople whom they do not like. Abigail
accuses Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of an upstanding farmer, whom she had
once seduced. Elizabeth's husband John Proctor reveals his past lechery.
Elizabeth, unaware, fails to confirm his testimony. To protect him she testifies
falsely that her husband has not been intimate with Abigail. Proctor is accused
of witchcraft and condemned to death.
The Crucible, which received Antoinette Perry Award, was an allegory for the
McCarthy era and mass hysteria. Although its first Broadway production flopped,
it become one of Miller's most-produced play. Miller wrote The Crucible in the
atmosphere in which the author saw "accepted the notion that conscience was no
longer a private matter but one of state administration." In the play he expressed
his faith in the ability of an individual to resist conformist pressures.
Miller's career as a writer spanned over seven decades,
and at the time of his death in 2005, Miller was
considered to be one of the greatest dramatists of the
twentieth century. After his death, many respected
actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to Miller,
some calling him the last great practitioner of the
American stage, and Broadway theaters darkened
their lights in a show of respect. Miller's alma mater,
the University of Michigan opened the Arthur Miller
Theatre in March, 2007. Per his express wish, it is the
only theater in the world that bears Miller's name.
IV. Analysis of Death of A Salesman
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur
Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which
the playwright was schooled. The play recalls the traditions of
Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial element,
reducing most plot to the confines of the nuclear family. Death of
a Salesman focuses on two sons who are estranged from their
father, paralleling one of Miller's other major works, All My Sons,
which premiered two years before Death of a Salesman.
Although the play premiered in 1949, Miller began writing
Death of a Salesman at the age of seventeen when he was working
for his father's company. In short story form, it treated an aging
salesman unable to sell anything. He is berated by company
bosses and must borrow subway change from the young narrator.
The end of the manuscript contains a postscript that the salesman
on which the story is based had thrown himself under a subway
train.
Arthur Miller reworked the play in 1947 upon a meeting with
his uncle, Manny Newman. Miller's uncle, a salesman, was a
competitor at all times and even competed with his sons, Buddy
and Abby. Miller described the Newman household as one in
which one could not lose hope, and based the Loman household
and structure on his uncle and cousins. There are numerous
parallels between Abby and Buddy Newman and their fictional
counterparts, Happy and Biff Loman: Buddy, like Biff, was a
renowned high school athlete who ended up flunking out. Miller's
relationship to his cousins parallels that of the Lomans to their
neighbor, Bernard.
While constructing the play, Miller was intent on creating
continuous action that could span different time periods smoothly.
The major innovation of the play was the fluid continuity between
its segments. Flashbacks do not occur separate from the action but
rather as an integral part of it. The play moves between fifteen
years back and the present, and from Brooklyn to Boston without
any interruptions in the plot.
Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway in 1949,
starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman and directed by Elia Kazan
(who would later inform on Arthur Miller in front of the House
Un-American Activities Committee). The play was a resounding
success, winning the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Tony Award for
Best Play. The New Yorker called the play a mixture of
"compassion, imagination, and hard technical competence not
often found in our theater." Since then, the play has been revived
numerous times on Broadway and reinterpreted in stage and
television versions. As an archetypal character representing the
failed American dream, Willy Loman has been interpreted by
diverse actors such as Fredric March (the 1951 film version),
Dustin Hoffman (the 1984 Broadway revival and television
movie), and, in a Tony Award-winning revival, Brian Dennehy.
The Family Members in Death of A Salesman
Character List
Willy Loman
A sixty year old salesman living in Brooklyn, Willy Loman is a gregarious,
mercurial man with powerful aspirations to success. However, after thirtyfive years working as a traveling salesman throughout New England, Willy
Loman feels defeated by his lack of success and difficult family life.
Although he has a dutiful wife, his relationship with his oldest son, Biff, is
strained by Biff's continual failures. As a salesman, Willy Loman focuses
on personal details over actual measures of success, believing that it is
personality and not high returns that garner success in the business world.
Biff Loman
The thirty-four year old son of Willy Loman, Biff was a star high school
athlete with a scholarship to UVA, but he did not attend college after failing
a high school math course and refusing to attend summer school. He did
this primarily out of spite after finding out that his father was having an
affair with a woman in Boston. Since then, Biff has been a continual failure,
stealing and even spending time in jail. Despite his failures and anger
toward his father, Biff still has great concern for what his father thinks of
him, and the conflict between the two characters drives the narrative of the
play.
Linda Loman
The dutiful, obedient wife to Willy and mother of Biff and Happy,
Linda Loman is the one person who supports Willy Loman, despite
his often reprehensible treatment of her. She is a woman who has
aged greatly because of her difficult life with her husband, whose
hallucinations and erratic behavior she contends with alone. She is
the moral center of the play, occasionally stern and not afraid to
confront her sons about their poor treatment of their father.
Happy Loman
The younger of the two Loman sons, Happy Loman is seemingly
content and successful, with a steady career and none of the obvious
marks of failure that his older brother displays. Happy, however, is
not content with his more stable life, because he has never risked
failure or striven for any real measure of success. Happy is a
compulsive womanizer who treats women purely as sex objects and
has little respect for the many women whom he seduces.
Charley
The Lomans' next door neighbor and father of Bernard,
Charley is a good businessman, exemplifying the success that
Willy is unable to achieve. Although Willy claims that Charley
is a man who is "liked, but not well-liked," he owns his own
business and is respected and admired. He and Willy have a
contentious relationship, but Charley is nevertheless Willy's
only friend.
Bernard
Bernard is Charley's only son. He is intelligent and industrious
but lacks the gregarious personality of either of the Loman
sons. It is this absence of spirit that makes Willy believe that
Bernard will never be a true success in the business world, but
Bernard proves himself to be far more successful than Willy
imagined. As a grown-up, he is a lawyer preparing to argue a
case in front of the Supreme Court.
Ben
Willy's older brother, Ben left home at seventeen to find their father in Alaska, but
ended up in Africa, where he found diamond mines and came out of the jungle at
twenty-one an incredibly rich man. Although Ben died several weeks before the
time at which the play is set, he often appears in Willy's hallucinations, carrying a
valise and umbrella. Ben represents the fantastic success for which Willy has
always hoped but can never seem to achieve.
Howard Wagner
The thirty-six year old son of Frank Wagner, Willy Loman's former boss, Howard
now occupies the same position as his late father. Although Willy was the one
who named Howard, Howard is forced to fire Willy for his erratic behavior.
Howard is preoccupied with technology; when Willy meets with his new boss, he
spends most of the meeting demonstrating his new wire recorder.
Stanley
Stanley is the waiter at the restaurant where Willy meets his sons. He helps Willy
home after Biff and Happy leave their father there.
The Woman
An assistant in a company in Boston with which Willy does business, this
nameless character has a continuing affair with Willy. The Woman claims that
Willy ruined her and did not live up to his promises to her. When Biff finds the
Woman in Willy's hotel room, he begins his course of self-destructive behavior.
The House of the Lomans
Death of a Salesman and the American Dream
Death of a Salesman is considered by many to be the
quintessential modern literary work on the American dream, a term
created by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, The Epic of
America. This is somewhat ironic, given that it is such a dark and
frustrated play. The idea of the American dream is as old as America
itself: the country has often been seen as an empty frontier to be
explored and conquered. Unlike the Old World, the New World had
no social hierarchies, so a man could be whatever he wanted, rather
than merely having the option of doing what his father did.
The American Dream is closely tied up with the literary works of
another author, Horatio Alger. This author grew famous through his
allegorical tales which were always based on the rags-to-riches model.
He illustrated how through hard work and determination, penniless
boys could make a lot of money and gain respect in America. The
most famous of his books is the Ragged Dick series (1867). Many
historical figures in America were considered Alger figures and
compared to his model, notably including Andrew Carnegie and John
D. Rockefeller.
Miller had an uncertain relationship with the idea of the
American dream. On one hand, Bernard's success is a
demonstration of the idea in its purist and most optimistic form.
Through his own hard work and academic success, Bernard has
become a well-respected lawyer. It is ironic, however, that the
character most obviously connected to the American dream, who
boasts that he entered the jungle at age seventeen and came out
at twenty-one a rich man, actually created this success in Africa,
rather than America. There is the possibility that Ben created his
own success through brute force rather than ingenuity. The other
doubt cast on the American dream in Death of a Salesman is that
the Loman men, despite their charm and good intentions, have
not managed to succeed at all. Miller demonstrates that the
American dream leaves those who need a bit more community
support, who cannot advocate for themselves as strongly, in the
dust.
The End