Historical Background of the Drama „Death of a Salesman“
First of all, Arthur Miller dont given specific information about the period of time in the drama. So we need to look at some circumstantial. Some points could be the things the family used in the drama like the car, tape recorder or the washing machine.
In a scene where Willy asks his Cheff Howard for his transfer to New York, Howard is busy with his new accomplishment, a tape recorder.
Such technical things must have been very new at the time. Although the first tape recorder was introduced in 1935, but it was first noticed in the USA in the late 1940s.
Thus, the temporal background of the piece can be limited to the late 1940s.
So furthermore, in the late 1940s there were economically a really bad time.
After the upswing in the 1920s, on the 29th October 1929, the Black Friday, the stock market crashed and after that, everything has recovered very slowly. So the phase after the stock market crash gets ne name: “The Great Depression”
I want to talk about a little bit about the Black Friday to give you some clues why this day is called black friday.
The Black Friday was preceded by an exaggerated boom of stock prices in the late 1920s.
Businessman, institutional investor (pension companies, insurance firms) and usual (normal) people started investing their gains and savings into stock.
Up to then overspeculation and “margin buying” in which investorss gave their brokes only a small fraction of the stock value and brokers borrowed the rest of the money in banks to pay for stocks (one of the main causes for the crash later)
So on the 29th of September 1929 the DOW JONES Industrial Average (US-American stock market) reached 381, nearly 300 points higher than it had been five years before.
So intelligent and forsighted investors began selling stocks and the prices drop massively.
Panic arose and so the Black Friday started. Everybody tried to sell almost all the stocks they had to save at least a little money. Millionaires loses so much money because of that.
5000 banks and thousands of business failed during the early 1930s and millions people lost their savings. Farther, the sales fell and fell and more business get shuted down. (Btw. 20 percent of workforce lose their work)
In a memorable scene in “Death of a salesman” which is supposed to play at the outset of Great Depression the audience can witness (miterleben) the tightening financial and economic squeeze. In the drama, the Lomans have borrowed money from other people, to pay the cost for their repairs and downpayments.
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