A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
—Arthur Miller, in Death of a Salesman
He’s a fake, and he doesn’t know the territory!
—Meredith Willson, in The Music Man
You’re gonna make something up, be sure it will help or keep your mouth closed.
—David Mamet, in Glengarry Glen Ross
The salesman, Uncle Charley reminds us, is first and foremost a spinner of dreams, a man who makes the world of illusions his special province.
Charley, Willy Loman’s old friend and next-door neighbor (a sort of adopted “uncle” to Willy’s boys), is the choric figure in Death of a Salesman; and when David Huddleston delivers the famous elegy over Willy’s new-made grave toward the end of the current revival of Salesman there isn’t a dry eye in the Broadhurst Theatre.
Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine . . .
It is a great speech—there’s no doubt about it—establishing the salesman as a figure whose very existence bespeaks a kind of lonely bravery and whose only crime is daring to dream too far.
The New York stage has been fairly busy with salesmen
