Death of a Salesman was published by Viking Press in 1949 and premiered at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway on February 10, 1949, directed by Elia Kazan with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award — one of only a handful of plays to win all three.
Willy Loman is sixty-three years old, a traveling salesman for the Wagner Company, and he is falling apart. His mind drifts between present and past without warning; he talks to people who aren’t there; he drives erratically; he can no longer sell. He has built his entire identity on the belief that success comes from being “well liked” — that personal charm, rather than competence or hard work, is the key to the American Dream. But Willy has never been successful by any measure except self-delusion: he has never earned a good living, his sons have not fulfilled the promise he projected onto them, his marriage is sustained by his wife Linda’s exhausting vigilance, and the house he spent thirty years paying for sits in the shadow of apartment buildings that have blocked the sunlight his garden needs.
Miller’s formal innovation was to dramatize the inside of Willy’s consciousness. The play does not proceed chronologically; it moves between present action and memory sequences (which Miller called “daydreams” rather than flashbacks, because they are not accurate recollections but Willy’s distorted, self-serving reconstructions of the past). The staging — originally designed by Jo Mielziner with transparent walls that became solid or translucent depending on the time period — made the architecture of Willy’s mind visible.
The play’s argument is simultaneously personal and political. Willy’s tragedy is individual — he is a man who has lied to himself for so long that he can no longer distinguish truth from delusion — but it is also systemic: the American economic system uses men like Willy and discards them when they are no longer productive. His employer fires him after thirty-six years of service with no pension. His sons — Biff, who has internalized Willy’s mythology and been destroyed by the discovery of his father’s adultery, and Happy, who has internalized it and chosen not to examine it — represent two possible responses to the American Dream’s failure.
The Text and Its Influence
The first edition was published by Viking Press simultaneously with the Broadway opening. The play has been continuously in production worldwide since 1949 and has been revived on Broadway multiple times, with notable productions starring Dustin Hoffman (1984), Brian Dennehy (1999), Philip Seymour Hoffman (2012), and Wendell Pierce (2019). It is the most frequently produced American play in the world.
Collecting Death of a Salesman
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1949): Orange cloth with dust jacket designed by Joseph Hirsch.
Market values:
- First edition, first printing, fine/fine: $2,000–$5,000
- Very good/very good: $800–$1,500
- Signed: $3,000–$8,000
- Acting edition (Dramatists Play Service): $50–$150
The first printing is identified by “First published by The Viking Press in February 1949” on the copyright page with no additional printings noted. The dust jacket features Joseph Hirsch’s illustration of a man carrying two sample cases. Jacket condition is critical to value; the orange cloth boards show wear easily.