SOURCE: Kolin, Philip C., and others. “Death of a Salesman: A Playwrights' Forum.” Michigan Quarterly Review 37, no. 4 (fall 1998): 591-623.

In the following essay, part of a special issue devoted to Arthur Miller, Kolin gathers reappraisals and interpretations of Death of a Salesman from several prestigious playwrights—including Edward Albee, Neil Simon, and Lanford Wilson, among others—on the occasion of the play's fiftieth anniversary.

Ever since it premiered on Broadway on 10 February 1949, Death of a Salesman has been an indispensable script in the modern theater. Louis Kronenberger described the heightened anticipation New Yorkers felt when the play opened after its tryouts in Philadelphia:

Whoever you met that had caught the show out of town had clearly seen a masterpiece already, and behaved a little as if he had seen a ghost. Few things in Broadway history can have had so sensational a build-up: fewer still—which is far...