Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem by Arthur Miller, Christopher Bigsby (Introduction) (Penguin Classics)

Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play that forever changed the meaning of the American Dream

Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, has spent his life following the American way, living out his belief in salesmanship as a way to reinvent himself. But somehow the riches and respect he covets have eluded him. At age sixty-three, he searches for the moment his life took a wrong turn, the moment of betrayal that undermined his marriage and destroyed his relationship with Biff, the son in whom he invested his faith. Willy lives in a fragile world of elaborate excuses and daydreams, conflating past and present in a desperate attempt to make sense of himself and of a world that once promised so much.

Widely considered Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, Death of a Salesman has steadily seen productions all over the world since its 1949 debut, including the multiple Tony-award-winning 2012 Broadway production directed by Mike Nichols and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman and Andrew Garfield as his son Biff. As the noted Miller scholar Christopher Bigsby states in his introduction to this edition, “If Willy’s is an American dream, it is also a dream shared by all those who are aware of the gap between what they might have been and what they are.”