My English-language teacher introduced the class to the play Death of a Salesman and its author. As a 17-year-old I thought that the husband of Marilyn Monroe could not be writing serious stuff.

But we were soon enough convinced of Arthur Miller's stature in the literary world when Miss Farley showed a Broadway performance that had George C Scott in the lead role of the tragic Willy Loman and Dustin Hoffman as his betrayed, confused and ultimately rebelling son, Biff (I can no longer remember the actress who played Linda, Willy's long suffering wife).

As it turned out, the play was depressing from start to finish. It taught me a great deal about the dreariness and the downside of life for ordinary Americans who enslave their lives to chasing the American dream. I saw this through the portrait of the sad and deluded Loman.

At the time, I wouldn't say that I enjoyed the play for the reason that in that one year we also had to learn Shakespeare's Macbeth, Dickens' Great Expectations, the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats, and some obligatory Australian works which included the novel My Brother Jack by George Johnston and the radio play Fire on the Snow, a dramatisation of Captain Scott's fateful expedition to the South Pole.

Exhilarating stuff, all that great literature. It was only that there were so many characters to study and lines to memorise for the exams that it was hard to keep focused on what I should be doing to be able to enrol into medical school.

As I progressed in life, I relished the thought that I no longer had to read literature for the sake of exams. It has become a truly enjoyable and enriching pastime, that is, if I can find that time. I began to find out more about Miller beyond the playwright and one-time husband of Monroe.

When his other famous play The Crucible was made into film in 1997 that had Daniel Day Lewis in the lead role, I persuaded, or rather herded my children who were quite young then to see the film with me.

I find The Crucible less grim than Salesman and it probably has a more timeless appeal. Of course, at their age, my children could not understand much of the story, let alone its allegory, and must have found it terribly boring. They were probably thinking it was no wonder that the cinema hall was near empty, even when its run in Malaysia was brief.

Principled person

Miller lived a long life, close to 90 years. Those of us familiar with the man would have noticed the news of his death in the international section of our newspapers and the obituaries in the world's major newspapers, from which I have taken the factual details of the writer's life.

For the latter half of the 20th century, he was one of the dominant figures in American theatre. From his plays which delve into the tragedies of ordinary men driven by modern society's materialistic superficiality and false values to seek material success over dignity and morality, we learnt of Miller's sensitivity and empathy for the common man.

This image of Miller as a sober, principled man is buttressed by his resoluteness in remaining true to his ideals in the McCarthyist witchhunt of the 1950s, a shameful episode in American public life at the height of the Cold War. His principled position in the face of political persecution and the judicial slap that followed is another pillar on which his exalted reputation rests.

Miller was a native of New York City. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe who made a fortune in the clothing business, only for this to be wiped out by the Great Depression. The family moved to a small house in Brooklyn which became a model for the Loman House in Salesman. Loman was purportedly modeled after Miller's uncles who were salesman.

While in school, Miller was tall, strong and athletic, showing little literary inclinations in his early years. However he was inspired to become a writer after reading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

Severe morality

As a post-war playwright, Miller was the greatest social dramatist of his era. He grew up in the milieu of left wing Jewish thought, his father's ruin, the McCarthy inquisition, his failed marriage to Monroe and his great disappointment in friends like Elia Kazan.

All this contributed to the strain of severe morality that runs throughout his work. He wrote of the tragedy of ordinary men and had great contempt for the American dream.

His fame as a playwright was assured with Salesman (1949) which went on to earn him the Pulitzer prize and great critical success. It typifies his thesis of the common man as the modern tragic hero.

Loman, a traveling salesman, stands as the American archetype, a victim of his own delusions of grandeur and obsession with success. Modern society forced him to choose popularity and material success over dignity and morality, a choice which drove him to destruction and suicide.

Miller's severe critique of the American dream in Salesman first found expression in an earlier play, All My Sons (1947). This is about a small-town mechanic who knowingly manufactures and sells faulty engine parts to the army, causing the death of scores of combat pilots including his own son.

The two plays had brought together the legendary duo, Miller as writer and Kazan as director, who is better known as the great film director who gave us the Marlon Brando vehicles, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954).

However Miller and Kazan had a bitter parting of ways with the McCarthy anti-communist hearings of the early 1950s. In 1952 Kazan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee when he "named names", identifying eight people who had been, along with him, Communist Party members in the Group Theatre in the 1930s in New York.

Miller appeared before the committee in 1956, denied he was a communist but admitted to attending some meetings sponsored by the Communist Party, but refused to answer questions about other people.

For Miller, the hearings came out of paranoia and hysteria, arguing that most of the people targeted by the committed had long since given up their youthful, idealistic enthusiasm for communism. As a result of the hearing, Miller was denied a passport to attend the world premiere of The Crucible in Brussels and received a two-year jail sentence for contempt. However, the conviction was overturned on appeal.

Universal theme

The Crucible is his most politically significant work, a tale of the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials of 1692, where several young girls accuse innocent townspeople of witchcraft to avoid getting into trouble for entertaining ideas of witchery themselves. Eventually even the most prominent members of the community find themselves indicted.

The main character, John Proctor, is given the chance to save his own life by confessing to witchcraft and naming names, but chooses to die rather than betray his friends and neighbours. Few doubted that Miller meant the play as a parable for the mass hysteria and political witchhunt of the McCarthy hearings.

Even though I had studied Salesman in great detail and learnt by heart some of the important dialogue, I much prefer The Crucible for its universal theme. It is something that could have taken place in any society.

The film adaptation by French cinema, Les Sorcires de Salem, was made in 1957, featuring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.

Not long after the release of the Hollywood version, we saw in the flesh how the elements of fitnah (slander), political witchhunt and manufactured paranoia were cunningly employed to crush a political rival, plunging Malaysia into her most acute political crisis.

In contrast, Salesman, for all its modern setting, paradoxically seems dated. I suppose the social milieu and ethos of post-war America are still within living memory for many people or easy to conjure up among non-Americans.

Yet, social changes are taking place at such a rate in the modern era that the traveling salesman of a few decades ago is today a relic of the past and the nuclear family that the Lomans typify is fast transforming itself.

Once, we might have harboured deep cynicism for the idea of the American dream for its crassness if not its brutal side, luring its victims into selling their souls and their dignity for the promise of material success.

But I wonder, with capitalism's predatory corporatism that marks the age we live in, is there a nostalgia, all his flaws and self-deception notwithstanding, for the individualism of the hard working and intensely ambitious common man, Loman? At least he has the choice and opportunity of control over his own destiny, something that ordinary people today have much less of.

The common man, squeezed out by big business, has been completely subdued, becoming part of that amorphous captive market whose duty is only to consume, in cradle-to-grave fashion, as the corporate world usurps the role of the state in providing healthcare, education, water, and just about everything else in that endless search for mega-profits.

I consume, therefore I am. That is our defining existence today - from essential goods and services to fashion to music.

With the passing of Miller in this era that sees the death of the common man and his re-incarnation as Homo consumeris, re-reading Salesman evokes a strange kind of nostalgia.