Summary
An inquiry into the meaning of the American Dream, Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s most famous play and won him a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. “Attention must be paid” to its lead character, Willy Loman (played over time by Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy, among others), who has come to represent the middle-class struggle. Readers seeking in-depth analyses of this affecting drama will appreciate this fully updated Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations study. Offering at least 50 percent new material from the previous edition, it includes the best critical interpretations available on Miller’s classic, collected from literary sources prized by librarians.
Specifications
Chronology. Bibliography. Index.
About the Author(s)
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. Educated at Cornell and Yale universities, he is the author of 30 books, including Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake's Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom's provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In addition, he is the author of hundreds of articles, reviews, and editorial introductions. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.