A lot of plays made history around 1949, but none have stepped out of history into the classic canon as Salesman has. The tragedy of Loman the all-American dreamer and loser works eternally, on the page as on the stage. But of course Miller made Manny into Everyman, and gave him the name of the crime commissioner Lohmann in Fritz Lang's angst-ridden 1932 Nazi parable, The Testament of Dr. As Christopher Bigsby's mildly interesting afterword in this 50th-anniversary edition points out (as does Miller in his memoir, Timebends), Willy is closely based on the playwright's sad, absurd salesman uncle, Manny. It's a sturdy bridge between kitchen-sink realism and spectral abstraction, the facts of particular hard times and universal themes.
This play is the genuine article-it's got the goods on the human condition, all packed into a day in the life of one self-deluded, self-promoting, self-defeating soul. Arthur Miller's 1949 Death of a Salesman has sold 11 million copies, and Willy Loman didn't make all those sales on a smile and a shoeshine.
