Loman

Was Arthur Miller (1915, GI Generation) making a point about Willy Loman's go-it-alone stance, versus the all-for-one attributes of Miller's generation? Willy is a salesman - a Nomad in more than one sense -  intentionally out on his own, not setting up support back home and ultimately not having any. There's some indication - in the fates of his brother and father - that it is possible to live, even thrive, that way. Even those "success" stories, though, are tinged with vice, not quite the right way to get through life.

It's surprising that Death of a Salesman was so successful in 1949 - an indictment of the American Dream only a few years after victory over Germany and Japan. The war is hardly even in the background, and clearly any post-war exuberance is long gone. (While it's not always the case that a story is set in the time when it is first published, the original Playbill indicates that it is set "today.") Some of it feels like the Depression, even if the apartments hemming in the house sound like more of a boom time.

Which appears to have been answered - or at least addressed - by Mr. Miller in an interview in 1998:

...that play was written in 1948, when we were starting the biggest boom in the history of the United States. However, a good part of the population, including me and President Truman, were prepared for another depression. We had only escaped the first depression by the advent of war. It was, I think, a year and a half into the war before we absorbed all the unemployed; therefore, what were all these young guys going to do when they came home? There had to be another crisis. [...]

Salesman appeared in '49 in a country already starting to prosper, and to take a completely unforeseen path. The psychology of the audience was still that of depression people. The depression had only ended maybe ten years earlier, and people were on very shaky ground for the following ten years because of the war and the uncertainty as to how the country and the economy were going to go. [...]  I kept being surprised by Biff's reference to being at war because it seemed to me later that this play had taken place before the war.

And it's not like there was only puppy dogs and flowers immediately after the war. The Hollywood Ten had been brought before Congress two years before Salesman opened. Lee J. Cobb, who first played Loman, would be before the HUAC two years later, and director Elia Kazan a year after that. Miller would eventually be there, too, and cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names - but not before writing The Crucible, about a similar frenzy in an earlier post-war period