Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman is a play by the American playwright Arthur Miller, first performed on Broadway in 1949, following Willy Loman, an aging traveling salesman whose declining career, strained relationship with his elder son Biff and inability to accept the gap between his inflated self-image and his actual failure drive the play toward his suicide, staged so his family can collect his life insurance. Structured with fluid shifts between the play's present and Willy's memories and delusions, rendered through lighting and staging rather than conventional flashback, the play interweaves Willy's decline with his younger son Happy's aimlessness and his wife Linda's anguished loyalty, building to Biff's confrontation of his father's illusions and the funeral that closes the play. Miller wrote the play as an explicit critique of the American Dream's promise that likability and salesmanship alone guarantee success, and of an economy that discards workers once they are no longer profitable. Winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, Death of a Salesman is widely considered one of the greatest American plays of the twentieth century and a founding text of modern American tragedy.