Eugene O'Neill

A controversial work of extraordinary power, remarkable length (9 acts), and use of asides to express the characters' unspoken thoughts. An outstanding, somewhat Freudian play from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Nina Leeds is a mercurial woman, haunted and broken by the death of her fiancé Gordon Shaw in the First World War – after her father had convinced him to postpone the marriage until his safe return. Always searching for the ever-elusive happiness Shaw gave her, she flirts with the feelings of the various men in her life: her friend Charles Marsden, deeply in love with her, is nevertheless too shy to confess; her new husband Sam Evans, with his own history of mental illness and inability to give her a child; Edmund 'Ned' Darrell, so desperate for her to leave Sam that he gives her the child she craves so badly. And then finally comes little Gordon, the result of Nina's affair with Ned, ignorant of his parentage – the only man she really dotes on whilst the others orbit around her... Eugene O'Neill's play Strange Interlude opened on Broadway in January 1928, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This edition includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

A true modern classic from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers, Long Day's Journey into Night is an intensely autobiographical, magnificently tragic portrait of the author's own family - a play so acutely personal that he insisted it was not published until after his death. One single day in the Tyrones' Connecticut home. James Tyrone Snr is a miser, a talented actor who even squanders his talent in an undemanding role; eldest son Jamie is an affable, whoremongering alcoholic and confirmed ne'er-do well; youngest son Edmund is poetic, sensitive, suffering from a respiratory condition and deep-seated disillusionment; and their mother Mary, living in a haze of self-delusion and morphine addiction. Existing together under this roof, and the profound weight of the past, they subtly tear one another apart, shred by shred. 'Set in 1912, the year of O'Neill's own attempted suicide, it is an attempt to understand himself and those to whom he was irrevocably tied by fate and by love. It is the finest and most powerful play to have come out of America' Christopher Bigsby Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night was written in 1939-41, and first published in 1956 (after O'Neill's death in 1953). It was first performed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, in February 1956, and had its first American production at Helen Hayes Theater, New York, in November that year. It won the Tony Award for Best Play, and O'Neill was posthumously awarded the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This edition includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

More Stately Mansions represents the first printing of the complete and unexpurgated version of Eugene O'Neill's play, prepared from the original typescript housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The sixth in a line of eleven plays O'Neill planned but never finished, the play was part of a cycle he called A Tale Possessors Self-Dispossessed. The cycle would have spanned several generations and traced the Harford family's pursuit of material gain from 1755-1932. O'Neill completed and published only one other cycle play, A Touch of the Poet. Arguing that the 1964 edition of More Stately Mansions, prepared after the playwright's death, was missing a substantial amount of material that O'Neill intended for inclusion, Martha Bower presents an entirely new edition of the play with this material - dialogue, character description, an entire scene, the epilogue, and large parts of other scenes - restored. Written in 1939, and set in the 1830s and 1840s, the play is still of contemporary importance in its frank exposure of the devious intrigues of an American family's exploitation of a business opportunity. O'Neill's enlightened vision fostered the creation of two strong, intelligent women characters and the candid portrayal of a family dominated by love, hate, and jealousy. Reflecting the playwright's own unresolved family and sexual tensions, Bower holds that More Stately Mansions is, in fact, more true to the reality of his own essential pain than the so-called autobiographical plays. This restored and complete edition of More Stately Mansions will stand as an important contribution to O'Neill scholarship.

The third and final volume of the first complete collection of Eugene O'Neill's dramatic writings (available exclusively from The Library of America) contains eight plays written between 1932 and 1943, when illness forced him to stop writing. They represent the crowning achievements of his career. O'Neill described Ah, Wilderness as "the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been." Set in the summer of 1906, it affectionately depicts the warm, close family of sixteen-year-old Richard Miller and the innocence with which he faces the trials of first love, strong drink, and sexual temptation. John Loving, hero of Days Without End, is split by his lack of faith into two selves: John and his Mephistophelian double Loving, who wears John's death mask and plots his destruction. Burdened by guilt but desperately wanting to love, John struggles with Loving's nihilistic hatred in what O'Neill termed his "modern miracle play." In A Touch of the Poet, Irish tavern-keeper Con Melody is drawn by his proud past as a Byronic cavalry hero of the Napoleonic Wars toward a fatal confrontation with his wealthy Yankee neighbors, the Harfords. Throughout More Stately Mansions, the idealistic yet cunning Simon Harford, his wife, Sara Melody Harford, and his mother, Deborah, continually shift roles and alliances as they engage in an eerie psychological and sexual battle for possession of each other and their own maddeningly elusive dreams. This volume presents the never-before-published complete text of the revised typescript for this unfinished play. The derelict inhabitants of Harry Hope's saloon in The Iceman Cometh find solace in their comradeship until their drifting calm is destroyed by the visiting salesman Theodore Hickey, who insists that they abandon all "pipe dreams" and face the truth about their lives. O'Neill carefully orchestrates the voices of over a dozen characters to form a chorus of overwhelming despair and surprising compassion. Hughie is a one-act dialogue between a reminiscing gambler and a weary hotel night clerk about the promise and loneliness of city life. Long Day's Journey into Night unsparingly dissects the pain, rage, guilt, and love that drive a wounded family apart and bind it together. In their summer home the four Tyrones--James, a proud actor haunted by poverty, his devout, morphine-addicted wife, Mary, and their sons, Jamie, a cynical drunkard, and Edmund, an aspiring poet--slowly unveil the truth about their lives until they can no longer hope either to save or to escape one another. Published and produced posthumously, it won O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize. In its elegiac coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone seeks the peace that has long eluded him in the arms of sharp-tongued Josie Hogan. The volume concludes with "Tomorrow" (1917), O'Neill's only published short story. 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.

Eugene O’Neill has long been celebrated as America’s greatest playwright. This year, in the centennial of his birth, Yale University Press takes pride in bringing out an edition of O’Neill’s little-known works of the imagination and his principal critical statements, most of which have not hitherto been published. Edited and introduced by eminent O’Neill scholar Travis Bogard, the pieces—mostly early works—shed valuable light on O’Neill’s artistic development. Contained here are a four-act tragedy, “The Personal Equation”; the original version of Marco Millions; a dramatic adaptation of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; a scenario “The Reckoning,” and Bolton O’Neill; the fourth act of “The Ole Davil,” which became, with some alteration of tone, “Anna Christie”; and two short stories, “Tomorrow” and “S. O. S.” Also included are an unpublished love poem and several critical and occasional pieces, composition of Mourning Becomes Electra and “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill,” written on behalf of his Dalmatian, Blemie. “There is here no undiscovered masterwork,” says Bogard in his foreword, “but much here foreshadows what was to come as ‘Tomorrow,’ written in 1917, explores the ground on which The Iceman Cometh was to be created. In some of the writing, O’Neill is struggling to learn his craft: the scenario of ‘The Reckoning,’ for example, shows him in the process of forming a lifelong habit of detailing a play in a long narrative account. In the poem to Jane Caldwell and the memorial for Blemie, glimpses of a gentle, private man can be caught. In the critical pieces, O’Neill attempts an uncharacteristic but interesting articulation of his theatrical principles. In all the fugitive works gathered here, the O’Neill voice sounds clear…. It remains worth hearing.” “An important work about an unknown O’Neill that will reveal this fascinating personality to the general public.” –Paul ShyreTravis Bogard, emeritus professor of dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, has edited many works and papers of O’Neill, including, with Jackson R. Bryer, “The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan.

This book--published on the centenary of Eugene O’Neill’s birth--contains the only comprehensive collection of his letters. Providing a representative selection of O’Neill’s voluminous correspondence written over a fiftyyear period to intimate friends and family as well as to literary and theatrical personalities, the distinguished O’Neill scholars Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer here offer through O’Neill’s letters new and revealing insights into the highly private life and thoughts of America’s greatest playwright.

Set in New England just after the end of the Civil War, Mourning Becomes Electra is O'Neill's three part reworking of themes from Greek tragedy. This adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia by one of America's greatest playwrights is a landmark in the history of theatre.

Long Day's Journey into Night was written in 1940 but not staged until 1956, after O'Neill's death. Unashamedly autobiographical, it is, as he puts it himself in the dedicatory note, 'a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood', a harrowing attempt to understand himself and his family.