During the post-war boom period of the late '40s, Willy Loman is an aging, traveling salesman, who despairs that his life his been lived in vain. Facing dispensability and insignificance in a heated, youthful economy, Willy is not ready to part with his cherished fantasies of an America that admires him for personable triumphs in the marketplace. But the reality is far more difficult than that, and the measure of Willy's self-delusion and contradictions is found in his two sons. One, Harold, is a ne'er-do-well gliding on inherited hot air and repressed feelings, and the other, Biff, a mousy, retiring sort unable to reconcile the difference between his father's desperate impersonation of success and the truth.