Selling Short the American Dream: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Selling Short the American Dream: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Summary/Abstract: The 1950s and early 1960s in the US are usually seen as an age of conformity. Mainstream America is affluent and vacillates between indulgence in consumerism and the anxiety that the impending confrontation with the Soviet Union produces, considering the possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction by nuclear weapons. This anxiety is also linked to such forms of response to the ideological rival as the anti-Communist witch trials of the McCarthy years. The current article places Arthur Miller in the context of his age, among the minority of artists and thinkers that are critical of the Establishment culture which manufactures consent. Two notable illustrations of his artistic discontent are The Crucible, a play which is a more than indirect allusion to the anti-Communist hysteria of the time, and Death of a Salesman. The latter play provides the scope for a discussion of the inability of some ordinary citizens to cope with the elusive American Dream.

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