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 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.

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

This collection of thirty years of interviews with America's only Nobel Prize dramatist records his encounters with the press and gives a striking portrait of the man and the process of his public mythologizing. A profoundly private individual, O'Neill struggled throughout his life to overcome his intense discomfort with oral discourse as he responded to the probings of interviewers wishing him to discuss a wide range of social, political, literary, and theatrical issues. Collected in their entirety for the first time, these interviews begin in 1920, when O'Neill was thirty-two. Serious American drama, for many, began and, for many others, ended with Eugene O'Neill. This collection lends new testimony to the truth of that assertion.

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.

Celebrated for their books on Eugene O’Neill and enjoying access to a trove of previously sealed archival material, the Gelbs deliver their final volume on the stormy life and brilliant oeuvre of this Nobel Prize–winning American playwright. This is a tour through both a magical moment in American theater and the troubled life of a genius. Not a peep show or a celebrity gossip fest, this book is a brilliant investigation of the emotional knots that ensnared one of our most important playwrights. Handsome, charming when he wanted to be: O’Neill was the flame women were drawn to—all, that is, except his mother, who never let him forget he was unwanted. By Women Possessed follows O’Neill through his great successes, the failures he was able to shrug off, and the long eclipse, a twelve-year period in which, despite the Nobel, nothing he wrote was produced. But ahead lay his greatest achievements: The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Both were ahead of their time and both received lukewarm receptions. It wasn’t until after his death that his widow, the keeper of the flame, began a fierce and successful campaign to restore his reputation. The result is that today, just over 125 years after his birth, O’Neill is a towering presence in the theater, his work—always in performance here and abroad—still electrifying audiences. Perhaps of equal importance, he is the acknowledged father of modern American theater, the man who paved the way for the likes of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and a host of others. But, as Williams has said, at a cost: “O’Neill gave birth to the American theater and died for it.”

"If one were to climb the beanstalk of American drama, what would be discovered at the very top is a giant. His name is Eugene O'Neill. He towers above American drama like a colossus, and for many critics -- theatrical reviewers and scholars -- other playwrights were but petty things to walk under his huge legs and peep about. ...'Monumental' is the word most often used to describe O'Neill's work, from Strange Interlude to A Touch of the Poet. This word may be used as well to describe O'Neill and his reputation. No one ever accused O'Neill, or his work, of being too small." So says editor Martine in introducing this collection with his own compendious bibliography of O'Neill scholarship. ISBN 0-8161-8683-9 : $28.50.