1. Miller was born on October 17, 1915, into a German-Jewish family in Manhattan; his father was a well-to-do but almost illiterate clothing manufacturer, his mother an avid reader.
When his father’s business collapsed after the stock market crash in 1929, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Miller graduated from high school.
His subsequent two years of work in an automobile-parts warehouse to earn money for college tuition are warmly recalled in his play A Memory of Two Mondays (1955).

2. At the University of Michigan he enrolled as a journalism student
At the University of Michigan he enrolled as a journalism student. These were the years of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Fascism, and the attraction of Marxism as a way out of the depression, and here Miller formed his political views.
Miller also began to write plays,which won prizes at the university and in New York. He then went to work for the Federal Theater Project, wrote radio plays, toured army camps gathering material for a film, and married Mary Slattery, the first of his three wives.

3. Most of Arthur Miller’s plays, as well, concentrate on the family and envision an ideal world as, perhaps, an enlarged family.
Often the protagonist’s sense of family draws him into conflict with—and eventual doom in– the outside world.
Yet, Miller recognizes that an ideal is sometimes a rationalization.

4. In Death of a Salesman(1949), Willy Loman’s delusions and self-deceptions derive from, and return to, his image of himself as family provider, and image he cannot live up to.
Driven by his desire to be “well liked,” a successful social personality, he fails to connect with either of his sons, and neglects his wife.
Thus, Miller’s treatment of the family leads to a treatment both of personal ideals and of the society within which families have to operate.

5. In Salesman, the action moves effortlessly from the present– the last twenty-four hours of Willy’s life—into moments in his memory symbolized in the stage setting by the idyllic leaves around his house that, in these past moments, block out the threatening apartment houses.
Salesman has provoked much theoretical discussion about whether modern tragedy is possible; Miller has thought of Willy Loman as a tragic character where others see him as merely pathetic.

6. Moreover, Miller sees Willy’s tragedy as that of an Everyman, not a victim of capitalism: “the Chinese reaction to my Beijing production of Salesman would confirm what had become more and more obvious over the decades in the play’s hundreds of productions throughout the world: Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time.”

7. Charley or Bernard: the two characters who embody the ethnic of hard work and of simple devotion to family
The juxtaposition of real work with the dreamlike and dream-driven labor of the salesman.

8. The American culture and economy: In the 1940s and 1950s American economy began to shift into the phase that one might label “postindustrial” and/or as “consumer culture”—that is, an economy centered less on industry itself than on advertising and public relations, activities that are all about creating images rather than actual things or, in Charley’s words, “a smile and a shoeshine” rather than “nuts and bolts.” Such an economy is, moreover, devoted not only, as Willy himself is, to the production of “dreams” in the sense of images rather than real things but also to the manufacture of ultimately unfulfillable “dreams” in the sense of consumer desires.

9. The tragedy of the common man: to what extent is Willy the victim of his society, that is, of capitalism? Does Willy have any choice?