"The Death of Salesmen": David Mamet’s Drama, "Glengarry Glen Ross", and Three Iconic Forerunners
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12797/AdAmericam.20.2019.20.01Keywords:
David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross, American drama, Selling/salesmanship, Americanism, Death of a Salesman, The Iceman Cometh, A Streetcar Named DesireAbstract
This essay places Glengarry Glen Ross in the context of David Mamet’s oeuvre and the whole of American drama, as well as in the context of economic capitalism and even U.S. foreign policy. The author pays special attention here (for the first time in English-language scholarship) to the subject of salesmen or selling as depicted in Mamet’s drama and earlier in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire—each of which also features a salesman among its characters.
PlumX Metrics of this article
References
Bigsby, C. W. E. David Mamet. London-New York: Methuen, 1985.
Bigsby, Christopher (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet. Cambridge University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521815576. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521815576
Bottoms, Stephen J. The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis. Cambridge University Press 1998, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511586255. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511586255
Carroll, Dennis. David Mamet. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Cohen, Robert. “Sam Shepard, David Mamet: American Playwrights.” Theatre, by Robert Cohen, 2nd ed., Mayfield Publishing, 1988, pp. 337-38.
Cohn, Ruby. “Eloquent Energies: Mamet, Shepard.” New American Dramatists, 1960-1990, by Ruby Cohn, Palgrave Macmillan, 1991, pp. 160-84, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21389-4_10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21389-4_10
Culpeper, Jonathan, et al. (eds). Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context. Routledge, 2002. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203003152
Dean, Anne. David Mamet: Language as Dramatic Action. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.
Fortier, Mark. Theory/Theatre: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2003.
Heenan, David A. The New Corporate Frontier: The Big Move to Small Town, U.S.A. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.
Hemfelt, Robert, et al. We Are Driven: The Compulsive Behaviors America Applauds. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1991.
“Interview with Arthur Miller.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 37, no. 4, 1998, pp. 817-27.
Kane, Leslie, (ed.). David Mamet: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1992.
Kane, Leslie, (ed.). David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: Text and Performance. New York: Garland, 1996. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203826096
Kane, Leslie, (ed.). David Mamet in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11397. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11397
Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross. New York: Grove Press, 1984.
Mamet, David. “The Human Stain.” The Guardian 7 May 2005, n.p., https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/may/07/theatre.davidmamet, accessed online July 5, 2019.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1949.
O’Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh. New York: Random House, 1946.
Saddik, Annette J. “Postmodern Presentations.” Contemporary American Drama, by Annette J. Saddik, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 129-50.
Sauer, David K. and Janice A. Sauer. David Mamet: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Sauer, David K. David Mamet’s Oleanna. London: Bloomsbury, 2009, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474242509. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474242509
Skelton, Shannon Blake. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474234757
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1947.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.