Death of a Salesman

Willy Loman has been a travelling salesman all his working life, is no longer able to do it, and cannot stop telling his sons the story about being well liked. The play moves between his kitchen and his memories without marking the seam, and ends with a funeral almost nobody attends.

It won the Pulitzer in 1949 and has been the standard American argument about what the promise of success does to the people who believe it and do not get it — which is a different, and darker, use of a formation reading list than most of the other entries.

Context: Listed under Drama at Lexile 1320; with The Glass Menagerie, one of two mid-century American plays in the band.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Arthur Miller — the playwright.
• The American Dream — the thing the play is an autopsy of.