Death of a Salesman Summary: Arthur Miller's Brooklyn Tragedy Explained
What it is about
Death of a Salesman is a stage play by the American writer Arthur Miller, first performed on Broadway on 10 February 1949. It ran for 742 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play that year. Miller gave it a subtitle that tells you a lot about its method: "Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem".
The setting is the Loman family home in Brooklyn, hemmed in by a row of apartment buildings, in the late 1940s. Willy Loman is a travelling salesman in his sixties who is exhausted, broke and losing his grip on the present. The play opens with him arriving home in the middle of the night, having failed to complete a business trip to Boston. He has recently been in a near-fatal car accident. His wife, Linda, is frightened for him and suggests he ask his boss for a job that does not involve driving.
What follows is not a straight line of events. Miller builds the play as a montage, cutting between the present and Willy's memories, daydreams and hallucinations. Scenes from fifteen years earlier push into the kitchen and the back yard without warning. The audience sees Willy's past as he sees it, which is to say partly as it happened and partly as he needs it to have happened.
The main characters
Willy Loman has given thirty-four years to the Wagner Company and believes, absolutely, that being well liked is the key to success. Linda Loman defends him, manages the household bills and understands more than she says. Biff, the elder son, is thirty-four and has done nothing with his life. He was a high school football star with scholarship offers from prestigious universities, but he failed mathematics, never got to college, and has spent the years since drifting around the Western United States doing odd jobs. Happy, the younger brother, has a job and a flat and a habit of telling people what they want to hear.
Around them stand the people Willy measures himself against. Charley is the neighbour who quietly helps. His son Bernard was the studious boy Willy once dismissed as an "anemic" loser, and who has grown into a successful lawyer with a family and a case to argue before the Supreme Court. Ben is Willy's long-dead brother, rich and absent, who appears only inside Willy's head. Howard is the young boss who inherited the company.
Across two acts, every plan the Lomans make collapses in a single day. Willy goes to ask Howard for work in New York and is fired instead. Biff waits hours to pitch a business idea to a former employer, Bill Oliver, who does not even remember him, and leaves having impulsively stolen a fountain pen. Willy, now unemployed, refuses a steady job from Charley but takes money from him, and tells him that a man is "worth more dead than alive". At a dinner meant to celebrate good news, the lies finally give way.
The themes
The American Dream sits at the centre, examined rather than celebrated. Willy has built his life on a promise about personality and success, and the play tests that promise to destruction. Class runs underneath it. Willy's work has value to him and no value to the company that employed him for three decades.
Then there is truth, and the family's appetite for avoiding it. Miller called these "private conversations" for a reason. The Lomans talk constantly and say almost nothing honest to each other until the end. Infidelity is the hinge: a single episode in a Boston hotel room, witnessed by Biff when he came to ask his father for help with his failing maths grade, explains why a promising boy went adrift and never forgave the man who raised him. A father's expectations, delivered as love, work here like a weight.
How it ends
Skip this part if you want the play fresh. Biff tries to tell Willy the truth plainly: neither of them is meant for greatness, and both are ordinary men who should lead ordinary lives. He breaks down and begs his father to let go of his expectations. Willy mishears it entirely as forgiveness and renewed faith. He slips into a final hallucination of Ben, who approves of his plan to die so that Biff can have the life insurance money. The play then moves to its Requiem.
Why it still matters
The play has been revived on Broadway five times and has won four Tony Awards for Best Revival, more than any other work. It has been adapted for the screen ten times. In 1999 the New Yorker critic John Lahr noted eleven million copies sold and called it "probably the most successful modern play ever published". It suits readers who want tragedy in a kitchen rather than a palace, and anyone interested in what work promises people and what it actually delivers.
