“Born Losers”: American Salesmen as Anti‐Heroes
“Born Losers”: American Salesmen as Anti‐Heroes

Summary/Abstract: The paper is an investigation of the anti-hero problem in Eudora Welty’s short story Death of a Traveling Salesman (1936) and Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949). Apart from the fact that they are both (traveling) salesmen, the two characters share in a number of features that may describe them as “born losers” (a phrase from a critical book title), basically in relation (and especially in the second case) with the American Dream. The paper also includes a commentary on the problem of tragedy (in its classical and modern meanings) and a rather idiosyncratic one on the mathematical “Traveling Salesman Problem”. Otherwise, both literary pieces are viewed as examples of imaginative treatments of failure in the heydays of modernism (and of “the death of tragedy”).

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