Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem

Arthur Miller

May 1998 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream
 
Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room.

"By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

"So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time

Ratings and reviews

Highly recommended. Tragic and telling of many who stake everything on a bet they cannot win. This was a tragic story of a man blind to his own mediocrity and consumed with the success that neither he nor his kin would ever achieve. His steps were fueled by hopes that were supposedly on the brink of being realized, only to never come to fruition. In the quiet moments of his life, reality would begin to push its sad, lonely, unfulfilled head above the surface of his illusions, only to be pushed back down. Even in the end, his illusions won.

The book is pretty good, but it slows down considerably at some points. The title of the book could have been chosen better, as it foreshadows the end of the play and gives little room for that "ecstatic" feeling you get when the story reaches its climax. Maybe a second reading is in order for me to actually give this review.

Started off a little slow but act 2 really picked up. One of the most depressing books ever but still a good read

About the author

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock. He has also written two novels, Focus (1945), and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. More recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season, and Mr. Peter's Connections (1998). His latest book is On Politics and the Art of Acting. Miller was granted with the 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.