Death of a Salesman
2008
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller believed that playwrights had a responsibility to the world around them.
Miller’s life was shaped by the Great Depression. Born in 1915 into an affluent Jewish-American family, he grew up during the 1920s, an idealistic and prosperous time for the nation. Sweeping change was everywhere. America’s victory in World War I promised an end to all future wars; women had been granted the right to vote, broadening and strengthening the country’s democratic principles; and Prohibition offered the hope to its many supporters for God’s kingdom on earth. Throughout the land, there was a growing belief in the greatness and destiny of the United States.
The foundation of this conviction rested on a decade-long economic boom that brought unprecedented material advancement. The prosperity was fueled by the stock market, which in those days allowed investors to buy shares with only a small percentage of the actual price, called “margins.” But in 1929, it all came crashing down. Marginal buying proved to be a house of cards, Wall Street collapsed, and the nation - and soon the rest of the world – plunged into The Great Depression. People lost their savings and their jobs. Everywhere businesses closed down, and millions of unemployed workers swarmed onto the streets, standing in bread lines and desperately searching for work.
The Miller family were among the victims of the crash. Young Arthur had grown up in a large house with servants, but when his father’s coat-manufacturing business went bankrupt, he didn’t even have enough money to go to college. Undeterred, he found a job as a shipping clerk in an automobile parts warehouse for $15 a week and managed to save enough money to enroll at the University of Michigan. There he studied journalism and English and graduated in 1938.
But Miller never got over the effects of the Depression. He later wrote
I did not read many books in those days. The depression was my book ...There was the sense that everything had dried up. Some plague of invisible grasshoppers was eating money before you could get your hands on it. You had to be a Ph.D. to get a job in Macy’s. Lawyers were selling ties.... Before the crash I thought “Society” meant the rich people in the Social Register. After the crash it meant the constant visits of strange men who knocked on our door pleading for a chance to wash the windows, and some of them fainted on the back porch from hunger. In Brooklyn, New York. In the light of weekday afternoons.
The Depression ground on relentlessly for ten long years, despite the efforts of President Roosevelt and the government to turn things around. But nothing worked. As the Depression took on the look of a permanent economic condition rather than a temporary downturn, Miller, like many Americans, began to question the merits of a system that had failed so utterly and left millions of families in poverty. He believed that America had lost its way, that in our devotion to wealth we had lost sight of the values and ideals of the founding fathers, and in our national mad dash to get rich we had lost our sense of fairness and compassion.
To show that something was wrong, Miller wrote Death of a Salesman. Theatre, he believed, had a power to move and change. He wrote that drama presents
“... the idea of value, of right and wrong, good and bad, high and low, not so much by setting forth these values as such, but by showing...the wages of sin....In other words, by showing [in my plays] what happens when there are no values, I assume that the audience will be compelled and propelled toward a more intense quest for values that are missing. For instance, should one admire success? Was success immoral? - when everybody else in the neighborhood not only had no Buick, but no breakfast?
[We Americans] still have the energy - if we could only find out how to form it and use it and symbolize it - to ask the big questions: Why are we alive? What does it all mean? ...I cannot accept that each man is an island and that...theater is some-thing done altogether for the pleasure of the artist and altogether to divert people from real life. I think there is a mission.
That mission for Miller was to point out misguided material values and the resulting fragmenting of the family. His first great critical and financial success was All My Sons, which condemned dishonest business practices. Two years later, Death of a Salesman probed flawed American values. In 1953, The Crucible, a scathing condemnation of the anti-communist hysteria after World War II, compared the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities with New England witch trials of the 1690s.
By that time, Miller was already established as one of America’s greatest playwrights. He continued writing plays until he was almost ninety, although his best work was written in the first half of his career. He is perhaps best-known for his 1956 marriage to and subsequent divorce from the iconic actress Marilyn Monroe. His 1964 play After the Fall, which premiered shortly after Monroe’s suicide, was based upon their relationship. Miller was also a tireless and courageous defender of human rights and individual liberties.
Arthur Miller died on February 10, 2005, at the age of eighty-nine, exactly forty-six years to the day that Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway. That play, like so many others that he wrote, is the legacy of a man who strived to build a better the world around him.
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