Death of a Salesman

In his essay, he briefly reviews the plays he considers the Great Americans, dismissing O'Neill as merely "Strindberg, hold-the-lox," and contesting the label "universal" for Salesman, although he offers only circumstantial evidence (i.e., Mamet's grandfather was a traveling salesman) that Miller's play is a Jewish play rather than a universal one. The audience response on opening night bore this out: suddenly Death of a Salesman was a young man's play, and the knowing laughter and the tearful sniffing of the young men watching testified to a shift away from Willy (Ed Swidey) to Biff as the central character. [...]in 1948, Jews in America were haunted by the Holocaust and fearful about anti-Semitism; Miller's own ambivalence, even in his overtly Jewish works-Focus, After the Fall, Broken Glass-is complex, so what is gained by this emphasis on the Lomans as Jews is unclear. [...]much defeats Willy: his personal history (abandonment by father and older brother and the resulting psychological damage) and public history-the new technology (emblematized in Howard's tape recorder and easily seen as the threatening mystery of the newest device from Apple), the overcrowding of cities (high-rise apartment buildings where there used to be fragrant lilacs) and the societal devaluation of manual labor (Willy is better at laying concrete steps than at selling; it's worth remembering here that Miller was a passionate carpenter and made much of his own furniture).