SOURCE: Otten, Terry. “Death of a Salesman at Fifty—Still ‘Coming Home to Roost.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 3 (fall 1999): 280-310.

In the following essay, Otten addresses the critical debate surrounding the categorization of Death of a Salesman as a tragedy, commenting that “the play completes the tragic pattern of the past becoming the present, and it affirms the tragic dictum that there are inevitable consequences to choices.”

“Tragedy,” Eric Bentley has warned, can “easily lure us into talking non-sense” (Playwright, 128). If so, Death of a Salesman surely doubles the risk. For likely no modern drama has generated more such talk than Miller's classic American play. After only two decades of strenuous debate seemed to have exhausted the subject, critics began to complain about “the pointless academic quibbles” about whether or not Death of a Salesman is a “true” tragedy (Weales, American Drama, 3). Such topics, wrote...