Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was among the most prominent and influential of American post-World War II playwrights. Many of his works are complex reflections on the darkness which lies behind the American Dream. Miller was born in New York City to a non-Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a ladies-wear manufacturer who was ruined during the Great Depression. As a young man, Miller worked at a variety of casual jobs. When he began to read extensively on his own, he decided to apply to the University of Michigan to study journalism. As a student there, he wrote a series of award-winning dramas, thus initiating his career as a playwright. His first major play, All My Sons, was produced and published in New York in 1947 and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

 

          For Miller, playwriting was an act of self-discovery and an effective means of communicating with other people. He has been called a prophet by a number of critics, and in that role has attempted to uncover flaws in American culture with the hope that we might strive to improve our lives. Miller’s work is described as deriving from a “vision that emphasizes self-determination and social responsibility and that is optimistic and affirms life by acknowledging man’s possibilities in the face of his limitations and even sometimes in the dramatization of his failures.” (Steve Centola, in Conversations with Arthur Miller, 1987)

 

          Death of a Salesman is probably Miller’s most well-known play, and its main character, Willy Loman, is an important cultural icon. After it opened in 1949, he became famous overnight and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award (again). On one level, the play is a depiction of the historical economic environment in the United States American society during the post-war period. Willy lived through major changes in the economic structure of the United States, including the wild prosperity of the 1920s, through the Great Depression of the 1930s and the renewed economic vigor during and after World War II. The play was written and is set in 1948, at the time when forces of capitalism and materialism came to the fore and technology was beginning to make grand promises for the lives of ordinary families.

 

          It is important to realize, however, that Willy’s story is timeless and his tragedy is universal. His failure is that of Everyman – in terms of his working life as well as his relationships with the members of his family. The reason for its success all over the world is that people recognize in Willy their own weaknesses and tendencies toward self-delusion. This is a play about the last terrible day of a man and about the flood of facts and lies, or reality and fantasy, of the actual and the potential that made him and killed him. Miller’s gift is that has made this character both specific and both universal.