Arthur Miller: History & Biography (Book Review)

If you're interested in seeing how to apply history and biography to understand an author's work (as my EL 150 students are), take a look at this book review. (Remember, quoting a book review of a book you haven't read is not good scholarship....)

LRB | David Edgar : Back to Reality

What Death of a Salesman can't be is a play about whether reality is real. Willy Loman may well be - as Bigsby argues - a man 'finally unable to separate reality from appearance', but we only know that because we can. Miller found a highly original way of dramatising the gap between the American dream and its achievement, and did it so persuasively that when they made it as a film, Columbia felt obliged to shoot a 25-minute preface about the generally enviable life of the vast majority of American salesmen, to which Miller responded not by asserting that the play was really an epistemological speculation but by asking why the hell they were so ashamed of their picture.