Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman
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Arthur Miller on Death of a Salesman
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A lobby encounter fifteen years in the makingThe first sighting of Willy Loman came when Miller was around seventeen. He had encountered a Miltex salesman named Schoenzeit while the two were carrying samples to an uptown buyer; the man asked young Miller for subway fare. The next day, Schoenzeit threw himself in front of the El train. Miller described that figure’s quality, not his death, as what stuck: the gap between the performance of cheerfulness and the exhaustion underneath it.
He had simply picked up the conversation from fifteen years before. That element of competitiveness — his son competing with me — was so alive in his head that there was no gate to keep it from his mouth. He was living in two places at the same time.
The man speaking was Miller’s uncle Manny Newman, encountered in a Boston theater lobby after a matinee of All My Sons in 1947. Fifteen years of silence, then no preamble at all: just a report on how well his son was doing. Newman killed himself within the year.
Newman’s death settled something Miller had been circling since his teenage years. The suicide did not initiate the project so much as it locked the emotional angle of it: this was material that looked backward from a final point, not forward toward one.
He committed suicide. That helped confirm my feeling that this man was always half in darkness. The darkness split him in half. The play was basically looking from the edge of the grave at life.
There was also a purely practical block that had kept the material on hold since 1937. Going through old papers in 1952, Miller found a notebook containing about twenty pages of dialogue featuring Willy, Biff, and Happy. The family was already there. What had defeated him earlier was form, not feeling: realistic drama required a kind of plodding linearity that could not follow the associative leaps of a man whose mind worked the way Willy’s did.
I was unable in that straightforward, realistic form to contain what I thought of as the man’s poetry — that is, the zigzag shots of his mind in all directions.
How he wrote it
A cabin built in a week, a first act written in a dayIn the spring of 1948, before he wrote a word of the play, Miller drove to his newly purchased property in Roxbury, Connecticut, and built a ten-by-twelve studio with two windows and a desk made from an old door. He had never built a building before. The cabin was not a retreat from distraction so much as a physical commitment: a structure whose only purpose was to hold one thing.
I started writing in the morning. I went through the day, then had dinner, and went back there and worked till I don’t know what, one or two o’clock in the morning. It sort of unveiled itself. I was the stenographer. I could hear the characters. I could hear them literally. I’ve always said since that playwrighting is an aural art. You write, but you’re really hearing it.
The first act came in that single sitting. The second act took six weeks. He finished with his eyes burning.
The structural problem Miller was solving was how to represent a mind that does not experience time sequentially. In a 1999 video interview, he described the technical answer he arrived at, which the play’s reception would later obscure: audiences and critics often called the non-linear scenes flashbacks, a label he rejected because it implied interruption. The past in the play is not a pause in the present; it runs alongside it.
That play, formally speaking, is a kind of invention. The idea was to make everything happen at the same time — the past and the present working together, instead of stopping and going back. There are no flashbacks in the play, and yet the past is always with us, just as it is in life, when you’re talking to somebody and you think of something 35 years ago. [paraphrased from audio]
For the formal model that could carry this simultaneity, Miller did not look to the psychological realism of Ibsen, which he felt wasted energy justifying the mere presence of characters in a room together. He named his actual source in a 1949 letter to a University of Richmond journalism student named Barbara Beattie, written while the play was still in its Broadway run.
If there is a formal genesis of Death of a Salesman it certainly is in the Elizabethan drama, particularly Shakespeare. From the point of view of form I have long felt that the spaciousness of his plays had been forfeited for a physical concentration which contradicts life itself.
Miller kept a sixty-six-page notebook through the composition, now held at the University of Texas at Austin, whose pages are mostly free of cross-outs. The directives he wrote to himself reveal what he was tracking emotionally beneath the surface action: the father’s size and ugliness as Willy himself perceives it, the need for pity, and the hidden mechanism driving the family’s destruction. He opened the notebook with a note about his own method as a writer.
He who understands everything about his subject cannot write it. I write as much to discover as to explain.
The personal thread
Selling was in the air through his boyhoodMiller grew up in a Manhattan household whose garment business collapsed in the Depression, and his uncle Manny Newman, a Brooklyn salesman, supplied most of what became Willy Loman: the father-son competitiveness, the compulsive self-invention, the suffering worn visibly on the surface. But Newman was not the only source. The name of the play’s central character has a separate origin that Miller stumbled on by accident, years after he had already written the play.
I’m now in ‘53. I’ve written the play three or four years earlier. And I said, My God, that’s where I got that name.
The name came from Lohmann, the detective in Fritz Lang’s The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, a film Miller had seen years before and wandered back into on 42nd Street in 1953 or 1954. When readers assumed ‘Loman’ was designed to evoke ‘low man,’ he was genuinely surprised. ‘It had no such thematic origin,’ he said. ‘Came out of Fritz Lang.’
The American Dream was not an abstraction Miller encountered through reading. He absorbed it as a material condition of his upbringing, and he came to see it as the unavoidable pole around which all American writing organized itself, whether the writer intended it or not.
The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out... Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to man’s pretensions.
On what the book is wrestling with
Tragedy without a throneThe question Miller was answering in the Beattie letter was whether Willy Loman could qualify as a tragic figure at all. Classical and neoclassical definitions of tragedy required a protagonist of high social rank, on the grounds that only an elevated person had far enough to fall. Miller granted the importance of the Fall while rejecting the aristocratic premise behind it. He was writing in 1949, in a democratic country, about a man with no rank to lose.
I too see the Fall as a critical aspect of tragedy, but our world has changed, and it is no longer possible to think of the Fall as that of a socially elevated person exclusively. But social status, to my mind, was and is only a superficial expression of a deeper Fall, so to speak, namely, the destruction of a man’s idea of what he is by forces opposing him. Any class is thereby given entrance to the precincts of the tragic, and so it is in a democratic society.
The social diagnosis beneath the tragedy was specific. Miller was not simply indicting capitalism in the abstract; he was pointing at the particular mechanism by which a society assigns worth to people. The same letter that argued for democratic tragedy named what he believed the play was ultimately for.
I see man’s happiness frustrated until the time arrives when he is judged, given social honor and respect, not by what he has accumulated but by what he has given to his society.
He followed this with a concrete list of who gets penalized under the opposing system: teachers, scientists, workers who make and build and create. Willy Loman, a man who accumulates nothing and gives everything to an idea of himself, is their emblem.
Miller consistently pushed back against readings that reduced the play to social critique and left it there. In a 1999 video interview he reframed the whole thing around an emotion that the political reading tends to crowd out.
It’s a love story basically, between a father and a son. Everyone in this play loves Willy. Everybody. [paraphrased from audio]
The play’s meaning proved genuinely unstable across cultures. After Miller himself directed the 1983 Beijing production, a CBS crew asked a young Chinese man in the audience what he thought. He said Willy was right: everybody wants to be number one. Miller described the play’s variable meanings in a Kennedy Center interview with Mike Wallace, where the contrast between European and American reception came up alongside that Beijing story.
It depends what continent you’re on, as to what it means to you. [paraphrased from audio]
His comment on both the European reading and the American one was the same: ‘We become too adapted to the reigning ideas of a society.’ The play, in his view, was designed to make that adaptation visible, not to confirm any one version of what it costs.
What he wants us to sit with
Willy’s two places at onceThe first Philadelphia audience fell silent when the curtain came down. Two or three minutes passed before anyone moved. Miller noticed that several men in the house had handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. Within days he heard that Bernard Gimbel, a department store owner who had been helped up the aisle that night, had issued a company-wide order that no one in his stores was to be fired for being overage. The play’s first audiences were not responding to a critique of capitalism; they were responding to something they recognized as their own situation. Miller returned to who was in those early houses when asked to explain the original impact.
A play is a transaction between an author and the audience. It doesn’t exist by itself. The audience in 1949 was a demotic audience — that is, everybody was there. I remember seeing policemen in the audience, firemen, school teachers, just ordinary people. [paraphrased from audio]
At the center of the play is not a failure but a collision: a father and a son who want the same thing and cannot reach each other. Miller stated this more precisely in a late interview than he had in most of his earlier commentary, and the precision matters because it shifts the weight of the play from Willy’s delusions to the relationship that outlasts them.
It is a love story between Biff and his father Willy. They are trying to get together at the same time they are being driven apart.
The question of why the play keeps getting revived, nearly eight decades on, is partly a question about the culture that keeps producing it and partly a question about what the role demands of its performers. Miller answered the second part in a 1986 conversation with Mel Gussow, and the answer was more candid about craft than about message.
I think Willy Loman is going to be around a long time because that’s a challenge. You can do it in a number of different ways. And it takes a big actor to do it.
The remark was offhand, but it lands on something the play itself keeps demonstrating: Willy Loman is not a type to be illustrated. He is a man living in two times at once, and every production that works is one where an actor can hold both without resolving them.