Death of a Salesman

A tragedy of an ordinary man

Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller's 1949 play about the last day of Willy Loman, an aging traveling salesman in Brooklyn whose belief in being well liked has failed him, his job and his sons. It opened on Broadway in February 1949, directed by Elia Kazan, with Lee J. Cobb as Willy. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play the same year. Its subtitle is Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem.

Miller's first title for the play was The Inside of His Head, and that is its method. The present-day action covers about twenty-four hours. Into it, without warning, come scenes from the past, as Willy remembers or relives them. Characters walk through walls. A flute plays when the past arrives. The audience sees what Willy sees and has to sort out which time it is in.

The main characters:

• Willy Loman, a salesman of sixty-three who has worked for the same firm for over thirty years.
• Linda Loman, his wife, who protects him and holds the household together.
• Biff Loman, their elder son, thirty-four, once a high school football star, now a drifter who works on farms out West.
• Happy Loman, the younger son, an assistant buyer in a store who chases women and lies about his position.
• Charley, the Lomans' neighbor, a successful businessman.
• Bernard, Charley's son, the studious boy whom Willy mocked, now a lawyer.
• Ben, Willy's dead older brother, who went to Africa and came back rich. He appears only in Willy's mind.
• Howard Wagner, Willy's young boss.
• The Woman, Willy's mistress in Boston.

The main themes are the American Dream, the gap between illusion and reality, fathers and sons, the value of a person under capitalism, and betrayal.

Act 1: the salesman comes home

Late at night Willy comes home to his small house in Brooklyn, surrounded now by apartment buildings. He has turned back from a sales trip to New England. He kept drifting off the road and could not keep his mind on driving. Linda, worried, urges him to ask his boss for a job in New York so he does not have to travel. Willy complains about Biff, who is home for a visit and still has not made anything of himself.

Upstairs, Biff and Happy talk in their old bedroom. Biff, restless and unhappy, has spent years moving between ranch jobs. He feels he is wasting his life but also hates the city's rat race. Happy has money and women but is lonely too. They hear their father talking to himself downstairs.

Willy slips into the past. It is about 1928. The boys are teenagers and Biff is a football hero about to play a big game at Ebbets Field. Biff has stolen a football from the locker room, and Willy laughs it off. Willy tells his sons that the man who makes an appearance in the business world, who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked, he says, and you will never want. He boasts that he is known and welcome all over New England. Bernard, the neighbor's son, warns that Biff will fail math if he does not study. Willy dismisses him: Bernard is liked, but not well liked.

In the memory Willy confesses to Linda that he is not selling well and that people laugh at him. Then a woman's laugh cuts in. Willy is in a Boston hotel room with The Woman, who thanks him for a gift of stockings. Back in the kitchen, Linda is mending her own stockings, and Willy angrily tells her to throw them out.

Charley comes over to play cards. He offers Willy a job, and Willy is insulted. During the game Willy talks to Ben, whom only he can see. Ben says that he walked into the jungle at seventeen and walked out at twenty-one, rich. Willy confuses the two conversations and quarrels with Charley, who leaves.

Linda tells her sons the truth. Willy's firm has taken him off salary. He works on commission and sells almost nothing. Every week he borrows fifty dollars from Charley and pretends it is his pay. She also tells them that the car accidents were not accidents, and that she found a short length of rubber hose behind the fuse box in the cellar and a new fitting on the gas pipe of the water heater. He is trying to kill himself. She demands that the boys treat their father with respect. He is not a great man, she says, but he is a human being, and attention must be paid.

Biff, ashamed, agrees to stay. He says he will ask a former employer, Bill Oliver, for a loan to start a sporting goods business with Happy. Willy is overjoyed and full of advice. He goes to bed sure that tomorrow will change everything.

Act 2: fired

In the morning Willy is cheerful. He will ask Howard for a New York job and an advance. Linda reminds him of the bills: the refrigerator, the car, and the last payment on the house.

At the office, Howard is busy playing with a new wire recorder and barely listens. Willy tells him the story of Dave Singleman, an old salesman who could sell from his hotel room in his green velvet slippers. When Singleman died, at eighty-four, on a train to Boston, hundreds of buyers and salesmen came to his funeral. That, Willy says, is the death of a salesman. He asks for sixty-five dollars a week, then fifty, then forty. Howard refuses. Willy tells him a man is not a piece of fruit: you cannot eat the orange and throw the peel away. Howard fires him.

Willy retreats into memory. Ben offers him a job in Alaska. Linda reminds him that he is doing well where he is. Willy turns it down, convinced that being liked will bring him wealth without leaving home. Then it is the day of the Ebbets Field game, and young Biff is a hero.

Willy goes to Charley's office to borrow money. There he meets Bernard, now a successful lawyer about to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Willy asks him why Biff's life went wrong. Bernard says that after Biff failed math, he went to Boston to see his father. When he came back, he burned his University of Virginia sneakers and gave up. Bernard asks what happened in Boston. Willy becomes defensive.

Charley gives Willy the money and offers him a job again. Willy refuses. Charley tells him that the only thing you have in the world is what you can sell, and that being liked has nothing to do with it. Willy says that after all the trains and highways, a man ends up worth more dead than alive.

At a restaurant, Happy flirts with two young women while they wait for their father. Biff arrives shaken. He waited six hours to see Bill Oliver, who did not remember him. Biff was never a salesman there. He was a shipping clerk. Alone in the office, he stole Oliver's fountain pen and ran. He wants to tell his father the truth.

Willy arrives and announces that he has been fired. He wants good news. Biff tries to explain, and Willy keeps refusing to hear it. Willy slips into the past again.

The memory is the hotel in Boston. Teenage Biff, having failed math, has come to ask his father to talk to the teacher. He finds The Woman in Willy's room. Willy pushes her out, but she demands her stockings, and Willy hands over the new stockings he bought for Linda. Biff weeps and calls his father a fake. That was the day Biff stopped believing in him.

In the present, the sons leave Willy alone in the restroom and go off with the women. Happy tells one of them that the old man is not their father, just a guy. Willy asks the waiter where he can buy seeds. He says he has nothing planted.