The genesis of the play was a chance encounter between Miller and his uncle Manny Newman, a salesman, whom he met in 1947 in the lobby of a Boston theater that was playing All My Sons.[6] Writing in a critical study of the play, author Brenda Murphy observed that Manny "lodged in his imagination and created a dramatic problem that he felt compelled to solve."[7]
Miller later recounted that when he saw Manny at the theater, "I could see the grim hotel room behind him, the long trip up from New York in his little car, the hopeless hope of the day's business." Without acknowledging Miller's greeting or congratulating him on the play, Manny said "Buddy is doing very well.'" [6] Buddy was Manny's son, and Manny saw Miller and his older brother as "running neck and neck" with his two sons "in some race that never stopped in his mind." When visiting Manny as a youth, Miller felt "gangling and unhandsome" and usually heard "some kind of insinuation of my entire life's probable failure."[8] Seeing him again in Boston, Manny seemed to the playwright to be "so absurd, so completely isolated from the ordinary laws of gravity, so elaborate in his fantastic inventions," yet so much in love with fame and fortune that "he possessed my imagination."[7] Manny died by suicide soon after,[8] which was the cause of death of two other salesmen Miller had known. One of Manny's sons told Miller that Manny had always wanted to create a business for his two sons. Learning that transformed Manny, in Miller's mind, to "a man with a purpose."
Miller had been thinking about a play about a salesman for years. He also had new interest in the simultaneousness of the past and present that was evident at their meeting, as it was plain that he and his cousins were viewed by Manny as they were when they were adolescents, many years earlier. Miller sought to "do a play without any transitions at all, dialogue that would simply leap from bone to bone of a skeleton that would not for an instant cease being added to, an organism as strictly economic as a leaf, as trim as an ant."[7]
In creating Willy and the other characters, Miller also drew on his relationship with his father as well as another salesman. Miller was himself the model of the young Bernard.[7]
