SOURCE: Murphy, Brenda. “Willy Loman: Icon of Business Culture.” Michigan Quarterly Review 37, no. 4 (fall 1998): 755-66.

In the following essay, Murphy examines the cultural impact of Death of a Salesman, focusing on the effect the play has had on the public's perception of salesmen.

In 1963, critic and director Esther Merle Jackson wrote a perceptive essay entitled “Death of a Salesman: Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre,” in which she argued that [Death of a Salesman] is “the most nearly mature myth about human suffering in an industrial age.” In Salesman, she suggested, Arthur Miller “has formulated a statement about the nature of human crises in the twentieth century which seems, increasingly, to be applicable to the entire fabric of civilized experience.” For Jackson, the unique power of this play, as opposed to other significant twentieth-century tragedies, lies in “the critical relationship of its central symbol—the Salesman—to the...