Eugene O'Neill was one of the great American playwrights of the twentieth century. Spanning the years 1910-1930, the 14 essays in this volume address the milieu he knew best--his friends in bohemian Greenwich Village, Provincetown, on waterfronts around the globe, and in the other beloved communities that comprised his early circle. At a time when O'Neill's creative powers were in their infancy, these influences formed the backdrop of his creative development and, consequently, demand more intensive study than they have received to date. This collection also highlights the larger modernist period and its impact on the First World War, the Little Theater Movement, the Abbey Players of Dublin, philosophical anarchism, and other contemporary upheavals that permeate his drama. Interspersed with rare period photos and illustrations, this volume contextualizes O'Neill's plays in the tumult of his historical and cultural moment, offering scholars a fresh approach to his life and art.

Provides a representative selection of O'Neill's voluminous correspondence written over a fifty-year period to intimate friends and family and to literary and theatrical personalities.

divEugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as his masterpiece and a classic of American drama. With this new edition, at last it has the critical edition that it deserves. William Davies King provides students and theater artists with an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; glosses of literary allusions and quotations; notes on the performance history; an annotated bibliography; and illustrations. "This is a worthy new edition, one that I'm sure will appeal to many students and teachers. William Davies King provides a thoughtful introduction to Long Day's Journey into Night—equally sensitive to the most particular and most encompassing of the play's materials."—Marc Robinson/DIV

An “absorbing” biography of the playwright and Nobel laureate that “unflinchingly explores the darkness that dominated O’Neill’s life” (Publishers Weekly). This extraordinary biography fully captures the intimacies of Eugene O’Neill’s tumultuous life and the profound impact of his work on American drama, innovatively highlighting how the stories he told for the stage interweave with his actual life stories as well as the culture and history of his time. Much is new in this extensively researched book: connections between O’Neill’s plays and his political and philosophical worldview; insights into his Irish American upbringing and lifelong torment over losing faith in God; his vital role in African American cultural history; unpublished photographs, including a unique offstage picture of him with his lover Louise Bryant; new evidence of O’Neill’s desire to become a novelist and what this reveals about his unique dramatic voice; and a startling revelation about the release of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in defiance of his explicit instructions. This biography is also the first to discuss O’Neill’s lost play Exorcism (a single copy of which was only recently recovered), a dramatization of his own suicide attempt. Written with both a lively informality and a scholar’s strict accuracy, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is a biography worthy of America’s foremost playwright. “Fast-paced, highly readable . . . building to a devastating last act.” —Irish Times

Agnes Boulton's memoir of her first two years of marriage to Eugene O'Neill was published in 1958, two years after the premiere of O'Neill's masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night. Contemporary critics dismissed the book as impressionistic, and it received little popular attention. Now held as a classic depicting one woman's strivings for self-representation, this new edition restores two sections previously excised for now-obsolete legal reasons. The new text features corrected misspellings and the addition of footnotes to clarify reference points and correct errors. Boulton's memoir represents an important addition to women's literature, as well as literary biography and autobiography.

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O'Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with aud...

 The plays of Eugene O'Neill testify to his continued search for new dramatic strategies. The author explores the Nobel Prize winner's attempts at creating a new Modern play. He shows how, moving away from melodrama or "the problem play," O'Neill revisited the classical frames of drama and reinvented theater aesthetics by resorting to masks, the chorus, acoustics, silence or immobility for the creation of his dramatic works.