"The Death of Salesmen": David Mamet’s Drama, "Glengarry Glen Ross", and Three Iconic Forerunners

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12797/AdAmericam.20.2019.20.01

Keywords:

David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross, American drama, Selling/salesmanship, Americanism, Death of a Salesman, The Iceman Cometh, A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract

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.

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Author Biography

  • Robert J. Cardullo, University of Kurdistan, Iran

    Robert J. Cardullo’s essays have appeared in such journals as the Yale Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Modern Drama. He is the author, editor, or translator of a number of books, among them A Critical Edition of Two Modern Plays on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff; Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950; The Theater of Fernand Crommelynck; German-Language Comedy: A Critical Anthology; and What Is Dramaturgy? A graduate of the University of Florida, Cardullo took his master’s degree from Tulane and his doctorate from Yale.

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Published

31-12-2019

Issue

Vol. 20 (2019)

Section

Articles

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

How to Cite

Cardullo, Robert J. “"The Death of Salesmen": David Mamet’s Drama, ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, and Three Iconic Forerunners”. Ad Americam, vol. 20, Dec. 2019, pp. 5-14, https://doi.org/10.12797/AdAmericam.20.2019.20.01.