Arthur Asher Miller was born to wealth, but after the Great Depression hit America, the
Miller family business took a huge hit and their income slowly dwindled. This ultimately became the cause of conflict between Miller and his family. To get away from the conflict, Miller moved away from his parents and turned to drama as a way to capture the reality of those years (Iannone
1501). Miller’s brother, Kermit, also became a source of inspiration for some of his plays. In time, Miller became one of the greatest American playwrights and has won many awards including the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for his dramatic play, “Death of a Salesman” (Thompson 276). The American Dream is something we all want to achieve. However, we all have a
different
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At the age of seventeen, Ben began his road to success and became rich at a young age. Although he is dead now, he is brought to life through Willy’s imagination. Ben made it big and now has diamonds to show his wealth. These diamonds used as a symbol for wealth, show Ben as being a strong man, rich, full of courage and self confidence. He is “everything that Willy has always dreamed of being” (Thompson 245). When they were younger, Ben had offered Willy a chance to go with him to Alaska, but Willy had declined the offer because he had met a man named Dave Singleman. At the time, Dave was an eighty-four year old salesman who could sell anything to anyone without having to travel. When Willy saw what Dave was capable of, he realized that “selling was the greatest career a man could ever want” (Miller 1745). Ever since then, Willy has been stuck on this one moment in time when Dave was successful and he sees how selling can be easy money. What he doesn’t see is all the years of hard work that Dave has put into becoming successful. Willy doesn’t stop to think that Dave might still be working because he really isn’t as successful as it looks and he has to keep working to make ends meet. Willy likes the idea of easy money and decides to stay in New York where he bought a house and raised two children, Biff and Happy. Charley …show more content…
One of Biff’s previous employers, Bill Oliver, had fired him for stealing basketballs. Biff was under the impression that he could go to Oliver if he needed anything. Years later, Biff has been unable to hold a job and decides to meet with Oliver to ask a ten thousand dollar business loan. Ironically, Biff goes to Willy for advice. Willy wants Biff to get the loan and he tries to give Biff some pointers, but eventually he tells Biff that “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it, because personality always wins the day” (Miller 1737). Willy whole heartedly believes that his sons will conquer the world with their looks and charm (Siegel 28). Biff is a sporty guy, handsome, and good with the girls, but he doesn’t have the intelligence like Charley’s son, Bernard. Willy has always been jealous of Charley’s success. He even tells his children that Charley is “not liked. He’s liked, but he’s not well-liked” (Miller 1720). To Willy, it doesn’t matter that Charley owns his own business and is able to offer fifty dollars a week to Willy’s charity. It doesn’t matter that Charley has raised a son, Bernard, who is a successful lawyer and arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court. Charley is seen as unsuccessful because he isn’t Mr. Popular and he doesn’t flaunt his success. Charley is a nice guy who, at times, can be brutally honest. He tries to tell Willy that
Arthur Miller’s success first began with his Broadway play, All My Sons, in 1947. This award winning play “Struck a note that was to become familiar in Miller’s work: the need for moral responsibility in families and society”. (Anderson 1212) Later, his production Death of a Salesman left him the group of America’s top playwrights....
At the beginning of the play it is evident that he cannot determine the realities of life, and so he repeatedly contradicts himself to establish that his conclusion is correct and opinion accepted. These numerous contradictions demonstrate that Willy is perturbed of the possibility that negative judgements may come from others. Willy strongly believes that “personality always wins” and tells his sons that they should “be liked and (they) will never want”. In one of Willy’s flashbacks he recalls the time when his sons and him were outside cleaning their Chevy. Willy informs Biff and Happy the success of his business trips and how everyone residing in Boston adores him. He mentions that due to the admiration of people he does not even have to wait in lines. He ultimately teaches his sons that being liked by others is the way to fulfilling one’s life and removing your worries. These ideals, that one does not need to work for success, demonstrate Willy’s deluded belief of achieving a prosperous life from the admiration and acceptance of others. This ultimately proves to be a false ideology during his funeral, when an insufficient amount of people arrive. Willy constantly attempts to obtain other’s acceptance through his false tales that depict him as a strong, successful man. In the past, he attempts to lie to his wife, Linda, about the amount of wealth he has attained during his
In the course of the play, Willy Loman is displayed as an adolescent who has not taken a grip on life. When parenting his children, Willy does not act as a father figure. He acts as if he is one of the boys who do not discipline his children. Because of this, Happy and Biff have nothing to strive for in life. Willy yearns for attention and he obtains this by bragging about how popular and athletic his sons are in comparison to his neighbor, Charley’s son, Bernard. “When this game is over, you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face. They’ll be calling him another Red Grange. Twenty-five thousand a year” (Page 63). In this line, Willy is showing off to Charley that Biff’s athletics will get him somewhere in life, while Bernard’s classwork and lack of social skills will never give him real world experience. Willy believes that hard work and dedication will never pay off “because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead.” (Page 22) In sum, Willy Loman believes that living in the momen...
Cardullo, Bert . "Death of a Salesman and Death of a Salesman: The Swollen Legacy of Arthur Miller." Columbia University in the City of New York. The Columbia Journal of American Studies, n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. .
Arthur Miller, in his plays, deals with the injustice of society's moral values and the characters who are vulnerable to its cruelty. A good majority of these plays were very successful and earned numerous awards. According to Brooks Atkinson, a critic for the New York Times, Miller's play Death of a Salesman was successful because the play "is so simple in style and so inevitable in theme that it scarcely seems like a thing that has been written and acted. For Mr. Miller has looked with compassion into the hearts of some ordinary Americans and quietly transferred their hopes and anguish to the theater" (Babusci 1261). This play, in 1949, received the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award (A Brief Chronology of Arthur Miller's Life and Works, http://www.ibiblio.org/...). Miller has said that he could not have written The Crucible at any other time for it is said that a play cannot be successful unless it speaks to its own time; hence McCarthyism was widespread when this play was written. Everyone was afraid of Communists, just like everyone was afraid of witches during The Crucible. This play won the Antoinette Perry Award and the Donaldson Award (Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller's The Crucible 55). His play All My Sons was concerned with a man, Joe Keller, selling defective cylinder heads to the Air Force during World War II, causing the death of twenty-one pilots, one of whom was his elder son. The play focuses around this act and the consequences that arise from it. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. All of Miller's plays focus on one central idea, this idea being ...
During most father-son relationships, there are certain times where the father wants to become more of a "player" in his son’s life than his son believes is necessary. The reasons for this are numerous and can be demonstrated in different ways. Miller is able to give an example of this behavior through the actions of Willy Loman. When Biff comes home to recollect himself, Willy perceives it as failure. Since Willy desperately wants his oldest son, Biff, to succeed in every way possible, he tries to take matters into his own hands. "I’ll get him a job selling. He could be big in no time" (16). The reason that Biff came home is to find out what he wants in life. Because Willy gets in the way, matters become more complicated. Partly due to Willy’s persistence in Biff’s life, they have conflicting ideas as to what the American dream is. Willy believes that working on the road by selling is the greatest job a man could have (81). Biff, however, feels the most inspiring job a man could have is working outdoors (22).
Miller’s life paralleled The Crucible in many ways. The characters in the play had many traits that resembled his. He and the people of Salem were censored by the frenzy of the times they were living in. The hysteria and the mob mentality exacerbated the anticommunists’ and the witch-hunters’ philosophies. The Red Scare affected Miller in the same way the witch hunts affected the people of Salem. As long as there are people with authority in the world, there will be challengers of authority. Censorship will always be used to make others conform. A majority of the public is and always will be easily influenced by hysteria and the mob mentality. Miller used his own experiences to write The Crucible, a play that describes universal behavior and the human condition.
During his time in college, Miller wrote many plays which, in turn, he won awards for. His first play “The Man Who Had All the Luck” opened in Broadway in 1944 but, unfortunately, was short lived. Then in 1953, The Crucible opened on Broadway. While the play did focus on the W...
Arthur Miller wrote plays as a way of showing people the real picture of what life was really like during the Great Depression and after World War II. Before the Great Depression many Americans were living in a significant time period, the Roaring Twenties. People had radios, automobiles, and movies with sounds. Then it all suddenly came to an end with the Stock Market Crash, leading to the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, Americans faced poverty, and had no income because jobs weren’t available. Throughout his life Miller influenced many people with his plays, and his contributions to this day because people want to read and understand what was truly happening in past history. For example, “The Crucible” is a play about the Salem Witch Trials, giving a good understanding of the basics that went on in this time period. Another example of Miller’s influential work is “The Death of a Sales Man”, which is his way of showing what life was like when people were struggling financially during the Stock Market Crash. Overall, Arthur Miller is one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century.
Aside from having poor parenting skills, Willy also fails to act as a role model for his sons. When Biff discovers his father’s affair with “the woman,” Willy l...
"Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly" (1021). It is the nature of man to make evaluations of himself based upon his peers. Willie's peer with whom he evaluates himself is Charley. Willie and Charley are about the same age, their children grew up together, and have been friends for many years. Charley has achieved what Willie has dreamed of for so long. Charley's son is a successful lawyer, whereas Biff is a loafer. Charley is successful in business, whereas Willie has "washed out." As mentioned before, for Willie to be great, Biff must be great. Willie has failed his job in making Biff better than Charley's son, therefore he fails his evaluations of himself.
Authors write with a purpose, sometimes this purpose is hidden and political, while sometimes it challenges the norm, while yet other times they write just to tell a moving story. In the end, however, all writers have the same goal: to produce a work that causes their readers to think about the plot and use their own mind to decipher the meaning. Arthur Miller is an exceptional author who possesses talent that exceeds the traditional author. Miller is one of the authors who chooses to challenge political figures, the norm, and many other assumed things about society, at least for his time. Arthur was born in 1915 and died in 2005; this gives a relative idea of the time period in which
Florio, Thomas A., ed. “Miller’s Tales.” The New Yorker. 70 (1994): 35-36. Martin, Robert A., ed., pp.
This thought coupled with a conviction that the smallest unusual and most unpretentious can move to the best statures is the main structure the point of convergence of Willy's influence. Obviously, Willy's form of the American Dream never works out. In spite of his child's notoriety in secondary school, Biff grows up to be a stray and a farm hand. Willy's own particular profession vacillates as his deals capability level lines. When he tries to utilize "identity" to approach his supervisor for a raise, he gets terminated.
Born into a wealthy family in 1915 in New York City, Arthur Miller would become one of America’s finest playwrights. Like many of the families during the Great Depression, Miller’s family suffered financial and social collapse during the 1930s. In order to pay for his education at the University of Michigan, he took on menial jobs that offered him the opportunity to be surrounded by those who had also suffered the same downfall from the Depression. These experiences would shape how and what Miller would write about in the future, including his Pulitzer Prize winning play, Death of a Salesman and the main character of the play, Willy Loman. Narcissism, mental illness, and the downfall of the American dream, define Willy Loman’s character in