Brooklyn Accents and the Paradox of Ambition in Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller

Abstract

Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller always strove to be in the center of things and would eventually find that to get there, they would have to use their Brooklyn origins to full advantage. Mailer would advance this knowledge in a book called Advertisements for Myself, turning to another Brooklyn writer’s tactics to make his own work understood. Borrowing from Walt Whitman’s self-promotion in “Song of Myself,” Mailer ultimately came home to the borough he had fought so hard to leave. Miller’s works show the influence Brooklyn’s working-class milieu had on him. It is in Death of a Salesman in which we see how Brooklyn accents—both literally and figuratively—not only give the work its resonance but also connect it to Mailer’s work. Most conspicuous are the very real Brooklyn elements in the play. It is set in the very house Miller lived in, albeit not during the Depression but amid the postwar housing boom, when neighborhoods such as his were in transition.