Sooner or later most discussions of the merits of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman turn to the question of the possibility of modern tragedy. Given the conditions of the modern world, the question runs, is it possible to write true tragedy in our time? Of course the very asking of the question sounds the negative. But there are likely to be answerers around who will invoke the names of certain moderns—Ibsen, or Strindberg, or O'Neill, or [Sean] O'Casey, or even Arthur Miller—who are alleged to have made tragedies out of the common materials of modern life. And Miller himself, in response to commentators who have denied that Salesman is a tragedy, has vigorously affirmed, in an essay called "Tragedy and the Common Man," the right of his play, and the matter it is made of, to the epithet tragic. (p. 82)

To put the matter very...