The action of the seven one-act plays takes place in the years preceding World War I

O'Neill's themes and concerns find expression in his one-act plays which are the dramatic equivalent of short stories. Here are nine one-act plays that span the playwright's career.

Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Pulitzer Prize winner, is widely known for his full length plays. However, his one-act plays are the foundation of his work - both thematically and stylistically, they telescope his later plays. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.

A selection of early work—including two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays—from Eugene O'Neill, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A Penguin Classic Included in this volume are seven one-act plays (The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, Ile, Where the Cross Is Made, and The Rope), and five full-length plays (Beyond the Horizon, The Straw, Anna Christie, and the classics The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape), all written between 1914 and 1921 and produced for the stage between 1916 and 1922. The majority of these plays are heavily influenced by German expressionism—Freud, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and the radical leftist politics in which O'Neill was involved during his youth. Also included in this unique collection is the little-known and highly autobiographical play The Straw, which draws on O'Neill's confinement in the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.

The only American dramatist awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Eugene O’Neill wrote with poetic expressiveness, emotional intensity, and immense dramatic power. This Library of America volume (the first in a three-volume set) contains twenty-nine plays he wrote between 1913, when he began his career, and 1920, the year he first achieved Broadway success. Many of O’Neill’s early plays are one-act melodramas whose characters are caught in extreme situations. Thirst and Fog depict shipwreck survivors, The Web a young mother trapped in the New York underworld, and Abortion the aftermath of a college student’s affair with a stenographer. His first distinctive works are four one-act plays about the crew of the tramp steamer Glencairn that render sailors’ speech with masterful faithfulness. Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees portray these “children of the sea” as they watch over a dying man, sail though submarine-patrolled waters, take their shore leave in a London dive, and drink rum in a moonlit tropical anchorage. In Beyond the Horizon Robert Mayo begins a tragic chain of events by abandoning his dream of a life at sea, choosing instead to marry the woman his brother loves and remain on his family farm. The sea in “Anna Christie” is both “dat ole devil” to coal barge captain Chris Christopherson and a source of spiritual cleansing to his daughter Anna, an embittered prostitute. When a swaggering stoker falls in love with her, Anna becomes the apex of a three-sided struggle full of enraged pride, grim foreboding, and stubborn hope. Both of these plays won the Pulitzer Prize and helped establish O’Neill as a successful Broadway playwright. The Emperor Jones depicts the nightmarish journey through a West Indian forest of Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter turned island ruler. Fleeing his rebellious subjects, Jones confronts his violent deeds and the tortured history of his race in a series of hallucinatory episodes whose expressionist quality anticipates many of O’Neill’s later plays. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The American classic—as you’ve never experienced it before. This multimedia edition, edited by William Davies King, offers an interactive guide to O’Neill’s masterpiece. -- Hear rare archival recordings of Eugene O’Neill reading key scenes. -- Discover O’Neill’s creative process through the tiny pencil notes in his original manuscripts and outlines. -- Watch actors wrestle with the play in exclusive rehearsal footage. -- Experience clips from a full production of the play. -- Tour Monte Cristo Cottage, the site of the events in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and Tao House, where the play was written. -- Delve into O’Neill’s world through photographs, letters, and diary entries. And much, much more in this multimedia eBook.

THE STORY: Originally produced on Broadway, revived to sellout houses in 1996 starring Al Pacino, HUGHIE was one of O'Neill's last works. It was originally intended as part of a series of short plays, but it became the lone survivor when O'Neill de