Playwright Arthur Miller, had a long, successful, award-winning career. He attended the University of Michigan, where he wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck in 1944, which was produced by the Federal Theatre Project in Detroit. Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949, and it won both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Among Miller's most famous plays are The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, and All My Sons.

Death of a Salesman is about a traveling salesman, Willy Loman, who suffers from severe delusions, depersonalizations, and flashbacks. The play blends seamlessly back and forth between the real and the imagined, as the audience slowly discovers who these people are and a story is slowly revealed to them. In the end, Willy decides that the best way to solve his and his son's problems is to 'accidentally' kill himself.

Biff and Happy are two brothers who have reunited, after several years of separtion, in their childhood bedroom. This is truly a time of soul-searching and self-delusion for the two boys. In the play, actors have to deal with a style of writing known as Selective Realism, where things aren't exactly like they would be in real life.