What are ways that Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman relates to his own life?

This is a great question. Certainly one of the key experiences
that shaped Arthur Miller's work was his first-hand experience of the Great Depression, which
could be argued to represent the catastrophic failure of capitalism. Arthur Miller's own father
had a clothing business which experienced tremendous financial problems at this time and Arthur
Miller himself worked as a travelling salesman. In addition, he had an interesting in learning
how to build, and when Willy buys wood and builds a porch, this is an experience taken directly
from Miller's life. Interestingly, Miller also worked when he was a schoolboy in a car parts
warehouse for a pitiful sum.

It is clear that Miller's experiences,
both personally and the experiences of his family, therefore have much in common with the action
of this amazing play. Miller himself admitted that he had a brief flirtation with the ideas of
Communism and Marxism, and while he declares that this play is not an attempt to destroy the
social system of America, we can see that he is trying to expose some of the falsity surrounding
American Capitalism and the American Dream.