Death of a Salesman - LLCER anglais

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller

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There's no way like the American way

1937 Louisville, Kentucky. Margaret Bourke-White. Original title of the photograph: “At the Time of the Louisville Flood" (Kentucky) Issued in Life magazine on February 15, 1937 Flood victims are lined up to get food and clothing from Red Cross relief station.

Index

Book covers

The context

Objectives

Further activities

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller

The context

The Great Depression

Watch the video and learn more about the 1950s

World War II

The American Dream

The Cold War

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Height of the American car culture

THE SETTING

THIS IS AMERICA

Michael Walkup, Production Dramaturg, Yale Repertory Theatre

• Paragraph 1. What do you learn about Brooklyn from a historical and geographic point of view?
• Paragraph 2. What are the main characteristics of Brooklyn? (population/ reputation)
• Paragraph 3. What attracted people to Brooklyn during the first half of the 20th century?
• Paragraph 4. Name some iconic American landmarks in Brooklyn
• Paragraph 5. Through the way the Loman’s house is depicted in Death of a Salesman, what changes have occurred in Brooklyn?

Answer the following questions about the setting

Death of a Salesman - book covers

1. Observe the book covers and describe them.
2. What aspect of the story does each book cover focus on?
3. Use elements from the context to illustrate your arguments.

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Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller

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About the playwright, Arthur Miller (1/2)

While back home, Miller also joined the Federal Theatre Project, an arts program sponsored by the U.S. government. However, before his first play could be produced, the project ended. A college football injury kept him from active service in World War II. He worked as a fitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and wrote radio scripts. He also wrote two novels during this time - Situation Normal (1944), a volume of material about army life, and Focus (1945) a novel about anti-Semitism. Miller had not, however, given up on playwriting. In 1944, his play The Man Who Had All the Luck won a prize offered by New York City’s Theatre Guild and received a Broadway production. The show, though, was not very successful - it closed after only four performances. It was not until three years later that Miller was able to find success on the stage. His play All My Sons debuted to positive critical reviews in 1947, and it was a big hit with audiences as well. This play established him as a significant voice in American theatre. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Donaldson Award, voted upon by subscribers to Billboard Magazine. Two years later, Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway and ran for 742

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan, New York City, near the lower edge of Harlem in 1915. His father was a comfortably middle-class manufacturer of women’s coats, and his mother was a schoolteacher. The Miller family moved to Brooklyn in the early 1930s because the Great Depression had plunged them into great financial difficulty. These years of poverty and struggle influenced many of his plays. After he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Arthur Miller spent the next two and a half years working as a stock clerk in an automobile parts warehouse until he had saved enough money to attend college at the University of Michigan. He finished college with financial aid from the National Youth Administration

and from the money he earned as night editor of the Michigan Daily newspaper. While there, Miller began to write plays, several of which were rewarded with prizes. Upon graduating from college in 1938, Miller returned home to New York where he married Mary Grace Slatter and had two children, Jane and Robert.

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About the playwright, Arthur Miller 2/2

performances at the Morosco Theatre. The play earned Miller the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949. Critics began to regard him as one of the greatest twentieth-century American playwrights.

Un-American Activities Committee, and was asked to tell the committee members the names of US citizens who were involved in Communist activities. Miller refused, and was thus cited with contempt of Congress, a serious crime. This conviction, however, was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1958.

The next several years were very good for Miller, during which time he had several hit plays, culminating with The Crucible, which debuted on Broadway in 1953, during the height of Senator Joe McCarthy’s congressional investigations into "un-American" activities of US citizens (which mostly meant involvement with the Communist Party). The early l95Os were a very tense time in American history; the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union made many Americans extremely worried about the safety and future of their nation, and Miller reflected the paranoia and hysteria of the time in The Crucible. As a result, Miller was denied a passport to Belgium to attend the opening of The Crucible there. Later, he was called to testify before the House

The mid-50s were also very turbulent times in Miller’s personal life. In 1956 he divorced his wife and married movie star Marilyn Monroe, whom he had first met in Hollywood in the early 1950s. This event brought him great notoriety and caused a media sensation, but in 1961 it also ended in divorce. Miller married photographer Inge Morath in 1962. They had two children, Rebecca and Daniel. Miller still wrote up until his death in 2005, although from the mid-eighties his work was more highly valued in London, where critical and popular success was much warmer than in the United States. He is revered as one of America’s greatest playwrights, the recipient of 7 Tony Awards and the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award among many others.

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