[This book] 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 shoeshine, [the author] 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 extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room.