The novels of Albert Camus are more philosophical tracts than novels, as we ordinarily understand the term. They are nonetheless compelling for that reason. And The Plague, despite—or because of—its ghastly subject matter, is one of the most moving books about courage and justice.
ARTHUR MILLER
1915–2005
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915. He was brought up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a small manufacturing business that he lost in the Depression. Miller, who had played football in high school, managed to scrape together enough money to attend the University of Michigan, where instead of playing football he began to write plays. His first major success was with All My Sons (1947), a drama about a manufacturer of defective war materials who is caught between his obligations to his family and to his country’s soldiers. The play gains its power from this conflict between intense loyalties, a conflict that, in different ways, imbues almost all of Miller’s works.
Death of a Salesman was produced on Broadway in February 1949, with Lee J. Cobb in the part of Willy Loman and Mildred Dunnock in the part of his wife, Linda. The play was an immediate and enduring success, winning for Miller both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Prize. Produced all over the world during the following years, it remains one of the most famous and influential plays of the twentieth century.
Death of a Salesman possesses great power; its emotional impact is so overwhelming that it is hard to see it performed, hard even to read. The story of Willy and Linda, and their two sons Biff and Happy, profoundly touches everyone, even if the reader or viewer has not experienced the same failed lives.
Ever since the play opened, critics, audiences, and readers of Death of a Salesman have tried to understand why the play is so powerful, why it hits so hard. The play is a tragedy, all agree; but the question is asked, How can it be a tragedy when Willy Loman is a little man, not a great one, and moreover a man all of whose ideas about himself and about the world he lives in are deeply flawed? His son Biff says Willy is a liar and a phony; strictly speaking, that is correct. Willy is not only a failure as a salesman, but also a failure as a husband and father. According to his own view of himself, he is a failure as a man: he has not been able to achieve any of the things that a man should achieve. And so, at the end of the play, he kills himself, in the misguided hope that his death will be a greater gift to his wife and children than his life has ever been: they will, he expects, receive the proceeds of an insurance policy and can start over without him.
Whether they will receive the money is not clear at the play’s end, but this is not the point. What Willy has never understood is that Linda and his boys have loved him for what he is, not for what he wishes he were. His whole life has been lived under the shadow of an illusion about what is important, but it never has really mattered to them that he was wrong about nearly everything. They knew how much he loved them and that he would give them anything, including life itself. But when he sacrifices himself they are heartbroken; they want Willy back, not the twenty thousand dollars.
Even more heartbreaking, I think, is Willy’s terrible and yet clear-sighted vision of himself—the self he sees through their eyes. He could not live with this, and so he killed himself.
Linda understands this and expresses her understanding in a speech that is often quoted. “I don’t say he’s a great man,” she says to her elder son, Biff, toward the end of Act One:
Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.
Willy’s friend, Charley, adds his own summing up after Willy’s death:
Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s the man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoestring. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.
Maybe the life of a salesman is not the best kind of life. What does that really matter, the play asks. Good life or not, it was Willy’s life; it was all he knew and could believe in. It was also a life that most people in his world understood and believed in. Therefore if Death of a Salesman is a tragedy—and surely it is one—it is the tragedy not just of one small human being, but of the society that has misled and betrayed him.
That is why the play is so moving. Whether or not we are salesmen, we live in the same society Willy lived in. We have been misled by it, as he was; and we can be betrayed by it, as he was. We can only hope to be as deeply loved as Willy Loman, even if we turn out to be as wrong as he was.
Arthur Miller continued to write good plays for years, including The Crucible and the View from the Bridge, until his death in 2005. Among his other distinctions, for five years he was married to Marilyn Monroe.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
1917–
Profiles of the Future
Childhood’s End
Arthur C. Clarke was born in England in 1917. The science-fiction virus, as he called it, attacked him when he was fourteen and he read his first copies of Amazing Science Fiction and Astounding Science Fiction, the two classic magazines of the genre. He started writing when he was fifteen. When he was nineteen he moved to London, where he soon became a founder of the British Interplanetary Society, a group of young science-fiction writers and enthusiasts who thought their dreams might some day become realities. In his twenties he had “the most important idea of my life,” and wrote it up in a paper titled “Extraterrestrial Relays,” which was published in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World. It was a proposal for the use of satellites for radio and TV communication. “Had I realized,” Clarke wrote, “how quickly this idea would materialize, I would certainly have attempted to patent it—though it is some consolation to know that an application would probably have failed in 1945.”
Clarke has written some fifty books, most of them science-fiction novels or collections of stories. By far his best-known work is the story (called The Sentinel) that he adapted for Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; Clarke wrote the screenplay and then a novel, based on the movie, under the same title. It made him a literary celebrity, and everything he has written since 2001 has been a bestseller. It is not always a good thing for a writer to become very famous; in the case of Clarke his earlier writings, prior to 2001, are better than those he has written after it.
There are many good stories and novels, but two books, I think, deserve special mention. One is a volume of nonfiction essays called Profiles of the Future, which Clarke published in 1963. It was not much noticed at the time, and in the blaze of post-2001 fame it has not been much noticed since, but it is an extraordinary book. In fact, I do not know of any prophecies of a quarter-century ago that have been so well borne out, and I think it is likely that many of Clarke’s prophecies for the next century will also come true: