ABSTRACT
Nothing is more interesting than the way plays, books, authors, are different at different times. Death of a Salesman is now an American classic and taken for granted, as classics are. It is a bit of a monument and we are all respectful of it. But I remember it when it first appeared and how it struck us then. I read it, for I was not likely to see it acted in Southern Africa, where the local amateur groups were not going to put on untried new plays from America. But people who read at all read everything we could get hold of from the United States. It was not only Arthur Miller, for he was part of a wave or movement of exhilarating work that could never have come out of Britain. Arthur Miller and Dreiser and Steinbeck, Dos Passos and Hellman wrote with 64uninhibited energy, in a new idiom. About Death of a Salesman we thought, 'This is a very good play: it is the real thing, and yet it is about people we recognise, and written by an author who is still alive.' And, too, it was about The Slump, and we had all known people hurt by The Slump.
