PENGUIN Death of a Salesman

I have been in sales most of my working life and I can relate so much to this play / story. Selling is all about the incentives – a fast track to the top and big bucks if you're good, but below the surface is the real pressure of the job - to produce the goods, week in, week out, the continual pressure of sales success and the company profit, on that your job depends. It's a life of continual ups and downs. The people in the business talk of ‘burn out’ and very few salespeople stay in the job for any real length of time!Willy was clearly burnt out in the end, maybe a bit of a dinosaur in a changing world. He was arrogant in many ways, or perhaps just 'conditioned' as many sales people are. Willy clearly had a concept of himself, his image and what he stood for and wanted for his family – the truth was that latterly he lived a lie and had a very fanciful grip on reality?Willy loved his family and wanted the best for them, but couldn’t grasp the pressure he was putting his sons under or the fact that they were already conditioned by him and mirrored his salesman's 'bluster' in many ways.He wasn’t against asking his only real friend and neighbour, Charley, for money when broke, but was far too proud to actually work under him when offered a job. He constantly talked up his old pals in the business world, and was justifiably proud of the the loyal stint he’d put in, but would his long standing boss and his so called business pals return that respect to Willy?The storyline builds up gradually and it’s quite obvious very early on that Willy is under strain and is not living in reality – things are going to hit the fan, it’s only a matter of when?The finale is beautifully written - it's compelling and poignant. It's undeniably a great play.

I came to  Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (Penguin Modern Classics)  via a description of its author in Max Frisch's  Amerika! . In it one gets the impression that some of the characteristics of Willy Loman - the protagonist - were not only those of Miller's salesman uncle Manny but got transferred to Miller himself (at least a couple of years after the play's prime).It is a day in life of a failed salesman, who still chases his American dream, at the same time being completely downtrodden and knowing that he is at the end. The other characters, his wife and the two sons - Biff and Happy - contribute to the illusion and have all been shaped and damaged by the same 'oversell yourself' dogma of Willy Loman.The book is pretty tragic and Miller manages to bring across the message well, that life is not always on the up for everyone and that boundless optimism alone will not cut it. Yet some perceived societal pressures make it incredibly difficult for many (cue Willy, his wife Linda and Happy) to face the truth and deal with it effectively. The consumer culture then just exacerbates the situation by the protagonist feeling under increasing pressure to deliver in order to stay within hailing distance of the neighbours and society at large.Funnily enough the book seems a perfect - fictional - complement to Barbara Ehrenreich's  Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream . It is a sobering read and is likely to leave you questioning some aspects of the corporate rat race as well as of the constant self-delusion that unmade Willy Loman, as well as many others in our society. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (Penguin Modern Classics)Amerika!Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream

Perfect, inexpensive copy of Death of a Salesman great for using to make annotations on.

One of the finest plays written in the English language in the 20th century. Widely regarded as Miller's finest work.

Over priced for paper back book, this is a skinny book.