Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller is one of the major American dramatists of the post-war period. Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and was educated at the University of Michigan, where he began writing plays. In 1944 his The Man Who Had All the Luck won a prize offered by New York City’s Theatre Guild. With his first successes – All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) – Miller condemned the American ideal of prosperity: that few can pursue it without making dangerous moral compromises. These were followed by The Crucible (1953), in which the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 are used as a parable for McCarthyism in America in the 1950s. The psychological tragedy A View from the Bridge (1955) questions the reasonableness of US immigration laws while After the Fall (1964) includes a thinly disguised portrayal of Miller’s unhappy marriage to film actress Marilyn Monroe. Other plays include The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The American Clock (1980), The Last Yankee (1993) and Broken Glass (1994). Miller also published short stories, several essays and screenplays, including the screenplay for The Misfits (1961) written for Marilyn Monroe.
FOCUS ON THE TEXT: DEATH OF A SALESMAN
THE PLOT
Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, can’t keep his mind on the present. He keeps thinking about his past, trying to find where his life went wrong. Having been demoted to a commissions-only salesman, as he was at the beginning of his career, Willy begins to wonder what has led him to this mediocre existence. The plays revolve around the last 24 hours of his life. Continua »