Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman is a traveling salesman who built his life on the American Dream and discovers, at sixty-three, that it was always a lie. Miller's play premiered in 1949 and won the Pulitzer. It's the great American tragedy because it insists that ordinary failure can be as devastating as any king's downfall.
A one-star review with 71 likes calls the women furniture, an unnamed secretary with four lines and three prostitutes with no interior life of their own, and other readers agree flatly that the women in the play are “pretty much a piece of furniture.” Willy himself splits the room: some feel nothing for a man they read as self-pitying and unfaithful, whose death registers as relief for his family rather than tragedy. High schoolers assigned the play often side with that read, one calling it “a bit wanky” and another finding it “not very interesting for most Highschool students,” a generational gap teachers online argue about constantly. On the page the momentum drops specifically in act two, and one reader admits “by act two I was starting to get fidgety,” a complaint that mostly fades once the play is staged rather than read cold.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
