Historical Context

• Set in 1940s America, Death of a Salesman examines the rapid economic and social changes of the time.
• Death of a Salesman was set in the late 1940s New York City, at a moment of rapid change in the USA.
• The country was beginning to emerge from the suffering of the Great Depression and World War 2, on the verge of a sustained period of prosperity and growth in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Miller captures the moment when the American Dream , with its offer of wealth, happiness and success for all who are prepared to work for it, seems to have been reborn.
• The play's references to a range of modern goods and brands( refrigerators, Chevrolet etc) show an American fast becoming consumerist society dominated by new marketing techniques with WL and LL reassuring themselves that their Hastings refrigerator must be a sound buy as it had "the biggest ads of any of them."
• Willy Loman:

  Miller also explores what is being lost in the rush to modernity- His hero, WL is a victim of a new, more ruthless version of capitalism which is beginning to emerge.
• His role as travelling salesman is becoming less relevant in age of mass-marketing strategies using new technologies such television.
• Likewise, as power and wealth becomes concentrated in vast cities such as New York, Americans are beginning to become more distant from the countryside, both physically and spiritually.
• The sound of the flute which opens the play, " telling of grass and trees and the horizon", is Miller's poignant reminder of an America that is in danger of being lost of forgotten as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in it's rapidly expanding cities.