Branching out from Alex’s biography of Arthur Miller, I would like to point out some parallels between his early life and the Loman family’s experiences. The biographical notes in The Portable Arthur Miller state: “When he was asked recently in what way his plays were related to the events of his life, Miller replied, ‘In a sense all my plays are autobiographical.’ The artist creates his biography through his work even as the events of his life serve to shape him”. (Bigsby vii)
Miller was a Jewish middle-class New Yorker whose father was an immigrant from the former Austro-Hungarian empire. While their ethnicity and religion are never directly stated, it is widely accepted that the Lomans come from a similar background. Miller also was born and raised in New York, going to high school in Brooklyn (the home borough of the Lomans). Also as a young adult, he worked as a loader and shipping clerk in a warehouse. These experiences are reflected directly onto the lives of the Lomans, specifically Happy and Biff.
The most striking parallel, however, can be seen in Willy’s ideal of being “well liked”. In Timebends: A Life, Arthur Miller describes his father as “a fellow whom policemen are inclined to salute, headwaiters to find tables for, cab drivers to stop in the rain for, a man who will not eat in restaurants with thick water glasses, a man who has built one of the two or three largest coat manufacturing businesses in the country at the time and who cannot read or write any language” (Bigsby 2). Miller’s role model obviously created the mold for Willy’s ultimate measure of success. While Mr. Miller was not formally well-educated by any stretch of the imagination, he was prosperous and popular by dint of his prestige and likability.
Source: The Portable Arthur Miller. Christopher Bigsby, ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
I think the parallels between Willy Loman and Arthur Miller’s father might even be deeper. We have Miller’s father, who as Caitlyn says, he described as being incredibly well liked by all. However, along with this deified image of Miller’s father comes the hard facts of life. Alex notes that the family garment business went downhill during the Depression. During this time period, the husband/father, was the head of the household, and completely responsible for financially taking care of the family’s needs. There was a commonly held idea that if you worked hard, you would succeed. Yet suddenly, no matter how hard a man worked, he could no longer fulfill his duty to his family. This had a crushing effect on the psyche of America’s families and men during the Depression, and is reflected in Willy Loman. I would venture to say that in Willy Miller is reflecting the emotional destruction of the family unit during the Depression, an emotional destruction that he probably witnessed firsthand while his family’s business failed.