Unit 23 Arthur Miller

A sixty year old salesman living in Brooklyn, Willy Loman is
Willy Loman:
a gregarious（社交的）, mercurial（精明的） man with powerful aspirations to success. However, after thirty-five years working as a traveling salesman throughout New England, Willy Loman feels defeated by his lack of success and difficult family life. Although he has a dutiful wife, his relationship with his oldest son, Biff, is strained by Biff's continual failures. As a salesman, Willy Loman focuses on personal details over actual measures of success, believing that it is personality and not high returns that garner success in the business world.
Major themes
• With a sense of realism and a strong ear for the Americ an vernacular, Miller has created characters whose voic es are an important part of the American landscape. • His insight into the psychology of desperation and his ability to create stories that express the deepest meanings of struggle, have made him one of the most highly regarded and widely performed American playw rights. • In his eighty-fifth year, Miller remains an active and important part of American theater.
Arthur Miller on Tragedy
“The common man is as apt a subject for
tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.” Tragedy springs from the individual’s quest for a proper place in the world and from his readiness to “lay down his life , if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.”
Arthur Miller
1915-2005Βιβλιοθήκη Short Summary
• American playwright and essayist • a prominent figure in American theatre and cinema for over 61 years • a wide variety of dramas • recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama among countless other awards, and for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. • Miller is considered by audiences and scholars as one of America's greatest playwrights and his plays are lauded throughout the world.
Major themes
• More than any other playwright working today, Arthur Miller has dedicated himself to the inves tigation of the moral plight of the white Ameri can working class.
Major plays
• The crucible 《炼狱》 is a play about the Salem witchcraft trials(萨勒姆女巫案） in Massachuse ttes in 1692 when innocent people were forced to make confessions and betray their friends or to be executed. It is a parable of the McCarthyite（麦卡 锡主义者） anti-communist “ witch hunt”.
• His hero often finds himself under pressure fr om society, trying in vain to extricate（解脱） himself from the physical and spiritual quand ary (困惑）and finding release only in death, often in the form of suicide.
Arthur Miller 阿瑟•米勒 & Marilyn Monroe 玛丽莲•梦露
Major Plays
• Death of a Salesman 《推销员之死》is a stor y of a traveling salesman，Willy Loman , wh o choose fame and wealth as the false goals for his life and is finally driven to suicide.
DEATH OF A SALESMAN《推销员之死》
• DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949) brought Miller international fame, and become one of the major achievements of modern American theatre. It relates the tragic story of a salesman named Willy Loman, whose past and present are mingled in expressionistic scenes.
DEATH OF A SALESMAN《推销员之死》
• Death of a Salesman won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Critics Circle Award, the play ran for more tha n seven hundred performances. Within a short while, it had been translated into over a dozen languages and ha d made its author a millionaire. • Dealing again with both desperation and paternal res ponsibility, the play focused on a failed businessman as he tries to remember and reconstruct his life. Event ually he kills himself to leave his son insurance mone y.
• All My Sons (1974)fostering his reputation as a n Ibsenian playwright/ Death of a Salesman(1 947)won him Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize.
Life Story
• With another two plays, The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955), Miller bec ame a name forever linked with Tennessee Wi lliams and Eugene O’ Neil • In 1983, Miller was in Beijing directing Beiji ng People’s Art of Theatre to stage Death of a Salesman, which enjoyed a great deal of po pularity. • Married three times/the second marriage was with the famous actress Marilyn Monroe in 1 956.
Character List
• • • • • • • Willy Loman Linda Loman Biff Loman Happy Loman Ben Charley Bernard
Summary
Willy Loman, the main character in the play, is an old salesman with an ambition for success. He has a caring wife named Linda, who understands him deeply and tries her best to protect his honor and encourage him. Biff, and his brother Happy, are both ordinary youngsters, but their father is proud of them. When Willy finds it difficult to realize his dream, he puts his hope on his two sons. Unfortunately, Willy ends up with getting fired when he goes to ask his boss for a job in town while Biff goes to make a business proposition. Then Biff fails lending money, causing a fierce argument between the father and the son.Having no other ways,Willy desires to kill himself in a car accident so that Biff can get enough money for his business.
Life story
• Born in New York in 1915/grew up in Depressi on /witnessed his father‟s business failure/work ed at a variety of proletarian jobs • Saved up enough money to go to university of Michigan/began writing plays and radio scripts