★ 台北美國學校閱讀書單

Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial.

He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremems of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room.


亞瑟‧米勒這部社會寫實經典名劇，描繪逐漸在現實生活中失去事業能力的推銷員威利‧羅曼邁向死亡的歷程，藉小人物的悲劇，呈現資本主義下美國夢的幻滅。他運用意識流的手法，讓人物不斷在現實的情境、虛幻的過去及想像的對話中移動。劇本甫發表即榮獲1949年普立茲獎，奠定了亞瑟‧米勒在美國劇壇的地位。該劇不只成為美國百老匯舞台劇名作，並多次拍成電影，翻譯為多國文字，在世界各地上演，堪稱二十世紀美國亟具代表性的文學作品之一。

——中文簡介摘自書林出版《銷售員之死》