By Women Possessed
Title | By Women Possessed PDF eBook |
Author | Arthur Gelb |
Publisher | Penguin |
Pages | 922 |
Release | 2016-11-01 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0399159118 |
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.”
Eugene O'Neill
Title | Eugene O'Neill PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen A. Black |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 606 |
Release | 2002-01-01 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780300093995 |
Stricken with guilt and grief when his father, mother and brother died in quick succession, Eugene O'Neill mourned deeply for two decades. This critical biography presents an understanding of O'Neill's life, work and slow grieving.
Eugene O'Neill's Critics
Title | Eugene O'Neill's Critics PDF eBook |
Author | Horst Frenz |
Publisher | Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press |
Pages | 256 |
Release | 1984 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN |
O'Neill's plays have been translated into practically all major languages and have received remarkable performances in many countries. His impact has been such that since 1922, according to Tuck, "there has been an outpouring of opinions about the man, his experimental work, his universal qualities, his philosophical probings, his language, his dramatic method, and his forerunners in the theater, American as well as foreign." As these 30essays indicate, O'Neill was truly an international figure, stirring comment from all parts of the world. O'Neill's stock rose considerably in 1936 when he received the Nobel Prize. His selection was applauded in Scandinavia as it confirmed the opinions of his work held in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The Nobel Prize also caused the critics of France to reevaluate his work, this time much more favorably. Summing up, Tuck notes that the "articles in this anthology reflect genuine attempts to present O'Neill as faithfully as possible throughout the world. O'Neill's plays are not," she observes, "for any one time or any one place, as indicated by the years the essays span (1922-80)and the number of countries they represent [17in all]."
Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle
Title | Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle PDF eBook |
Author | Doris Alexander |
Publisher | Penn State Press |
Pages | 354 |
Release | 2010-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0271041021 |
In Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle, Doris Alexander gives us a new kind of inside biography that begins where the others leave off. It follows O'Neill through the door into his writing room to give a blow-by-blow account of how he fought out in his plays his great life battles&—love against hate, doubt against belief, life against death&—to an ever-expanding understanding. It presents a new kind of criticism, showing how O'Neill's most intimate struggles worked their way to resolution through the drama of his plays. Alexander reveals that he was engineering his own consciousness through his plays and solving his life problems&—while the tone, imagery, and richness of the plays all came out of the nexus of memories summoned up by the urgency of the problems he faced in them. By the way of O'Neill, this study moves toward a theory of the impulse that sets off a writer's creativity, and a theory of how that impulse acts to shape a work, not only in a dramatist like O'Neill but also in the case of writers in other mediums, and even of painters and composers. The study begins with Desire Under the Elms because that play's plot was consolidated by a dream that opened up the transfixing grief that precipitated the play for O'Neill, and it ends with Days Without End when he had resolved his major emotional-philosophical struggle and created within himself the voice of his final great plays. Since the analysis brings to bear on the plays all of his conscious decisions, ideas, theories, as well as the life-and-death struggles motivating them, documenting even the final creative changes made during rehearsals, this book provides a definitive account of the nine plays analyzed in detail (Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, and Days Without End, with additional analysis of plays written before and after.
Eugene O'Neill's America
Title | Eugene O'Neill's America PDF eBook |
Author | John Patrick Diggins |
Publisher | ReadHowYouWant.com |
Pages | 598 |
Release | 2010-10 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1459605918 |
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...
Eugene O'Neill and the Critics ...
Title | Eugene O'Neill and the Critics ... PDF eBook |
Author | Leon DeRoy Skinner |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Eugene O'Neill
Title | Eugene O'Neill PDF eBook |
Author | Robert M. Dowling |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 566 |
Release | 2014-10-28 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0300210590 |
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