Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller(1949)
An aging man with a sample case and a shoeshine steps off a train in New York, and the weight of his own mythology is finally more than he can carry. Arthur Miller's 1949 play made Willy Loman the tragic hero of the American middle class: a man who believed that being well-liked was the engine of success and who cannot absorb the evidence that the engine has failed. The play moves freely between present desperation and remembered promise, so that Willy's Brooklyn backyard contains both the cramped reality of apartment towers closing in and the luminous ghost of a future that never arrived. His sons inherit the confusion. Miller insists that a common man's delusion, held with enough fervour, rises to the level of tragedy.
If you loved this
Fitzgerald and Miller both autopsy the American Dream, but Gatsby at least got the mansion.
O'Neill strips another American family to the bone in a single night, and the fog is just as thick.
Chekhov wrote the same elegy for a vanishing world, but with Russian birch trees instead of Brooklyn gardens.