Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 8694 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (1)

A tour de force of the great playwright's life.
An excellent rendition of the life of Eugene O'Neill. I was mesmerized. Surprising that a play could hold me like it did. Hope to see it on stage some day. ... Read more

Book Description
Stricken with guilt and grief when his father, mother, and brother died in quick succession, young playwright Eugene O'Neill mourned deeply for two decades. This enlightening critical biography presents a remarkable new understanding of the playwright's life, work, and slow grieving. Stephen A. Black argues that O'Neill's writing was a form of self-psychoanalysis and that his plays reflect his psychological and artistic growth. Selected by Choice as an outstanding academic title for 2000 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

O'Neill's long day's journey on Black's couch.
It has been nearly fifty years since Eugene O'Neill's death.Much hasbeen written about him since that time.In his new biography, StephenBlack insightfully analyzes the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning dramatistand his work.Black is an English professor with training as apsychoanalytic therapist.The "thesis" of his biography, Blackwrites, "is that O'Neill spent most of his writing life inmourning" (p. xvi).O'Neill, he contends, used playwriting as a meansof self-therapy.

Black's 543-page biography is filled with interestinginformation about his subject's troubled life.We learn, for instance,O'Neill was born in a hotel room in 1888, and died in a hotel room in 1953. In between, he lived "a life of earthly and psychic wandering"(p. 43).At the time of his birth, O'Neill's mother became addicted tomorphine, for which he blamed himself.As a mother, Ella O'Neill was"lonely" and "inadequate" (pp. 48, 51).O'Neill'sfather, an actor, was "revered," though "distant" (p.47).O'Neill's estranged daughter, Oona, married Charlie Chaplin when shewas 17.Chaplin was 54, and two month's younger than O'Neill.We learnthat O'Neill's life was plagued with, among other things (and the list islong), illness, depression, alcoholism, family tension, unhappy marriages,and one devastating death after another.Truly, it is a wonder O'Neillever found his way through the obstacles in his life to write four PulitzerPrize winning plays, and to win the Nobel Prize in literature in1936.

Black's book also contains plenty of perceptive commentary aboutO'Neill's plays.It ends with an impressive bibliography.Although Ioccasionally found O'Neill spending too much time on Black's couch in thispsychoanalytical biography, this is nevertheless a worthwhile book foranyone interested in the playwright or his writing.

G. Merritt

outstanding psychoanalytic interpretation
Stephen A. Black has assembled an extraordinary range of materials to provide the first comprehensive psychoanalysis of O'Neill. Others have offered fragmentary perspectives, or analyses based on a little reading inpsychoanalytic theory, but Black brings his experience as a trained analyst(as well as a literary scholar) to a through review of the historicaldocuments. It must have been harrowing work for him, but we all stand tobenefit from his having gone into the very mouth of a hellish psyche.(Hmmm... not so sure about that metaphor.) Anyway, it's a terrific book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too."
When Eugene O'Neill wrote this play in 1940, it was so autobiographical that O'Neill requested it not be published until twenty-five years after his death. When he died in 1953, all the other characters in the play had also died, however, and his wife allowed the play's publication in 1956. Despite O'Neill's three previous Pulitzer Prizes and his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, it is this play (also a Pulitzer winner) that he regarded as his most important work, an assessment with which historians and theatre-goers universally agree. Many (and I am one) also believe it is the greatest American play ever written.

Long Day's Journey Into Night is a complete theatrical experience, satisfying on every level. Recreating his own family and its interactions, O'Neill's emotional connection with the characters is obvious in the roundness of their characterizations: there are no villains or heroes here. James Tyrone, modeled on his father, is an actor who found the "perfect play," resulting in years of travel performing the same role. Permanently typecast and by now bored, James has earned a substantial salary but is considered a tightwad, unable to escape his memories of poverty. Mary Tyrone, his wife, to whom he is devoted, traveled with him when he performed, often leaving the children with family members. When her youngest child died in her absence, she blamed everyone for this accident. Edmund, modeled on O'Neill himself, was born after this, but Mary never recovered, and when an incompetent doctor prescribed drugs, she became blissfully addicted.

The two sons, Jamie and Edmund, observe the interactions of their parents, their father losing himself in alcohol, their mother constantly re-addicting herself so she can live in a world without hurt, and they interact both with both parents and with each other. Jamie, considerably older than Edmund, regards himself as Edmund's protector, both from the outside world and from the sometimes hurtful relationships both have with their parents, who regard Jamie as a failure because of his drinking, and Edmund as a baby. Edmund, however, has traveled the world before returning home recently with a "bad summer cold," obviously the early stages of tuberculosis, a reality his mother refuses to recognize. As he awaits an official diagnosis from a cut-rate doctor, Edmund tries to channel his feelings and his fears into the poems he writes.

Though many gifted dramatists can make one or two characters come alive in a play, O'Neill does it here for all four characters, each of whom rings completely true. Their actions and conflicts arise from within, and the viewer becomes completely caught up in the dialogue and events on stage because they are so natural, so life-like. Though the play is about three and a half hours long, these are hours that fly by, the intensity of the family's internal conflicts totally involving, as the love underlying these conflicts and the hidden resentments which ignite them emerge at odd moments and create poignant scenes. Ironic humor, much more obvious in the hands of outstanding stage actors than in the written script, provides relief from the powerful tensions and keeps the play from ever appearing sentimental or melodramatic. The most moving theatrical experience I have ever had, this play is breathtaking, heart-rending, and utterly overwhelming. Mary Whipple

It's indeed a long journey taken by eachTyrone
It's a long,foggy voyage taken in Edmond's deep ocean and its very sad. Through the blurry minds of the four members of the Tyrone's we travel back into their pasts and follow their tragic flaw. EspeciallyMary's choice has destroyed her whole life. Even though she loves James , its obviousthat she has wasted her life by following his ambitions of becoming anactor and also has become a victim of his misery. James Tyrone is an oldman now who unfortunately has not been able to get rid of his childhood'sfears. The poverty that he suffered along with his three brothers hasturned him into a vicious man.Who can blame him?He has suffered a lot whenhe was only 10 years old. How can we deny the fact that only the ones whoexperience real poverty, do know it closely and are afraid of it. He doesnot dare spend a bit more of his money for his own son's health. Money ismore important than anything for him. Thus we see the couple lead theirchildren into an unsober life .Its almost as if the father is like a Tyrantinstead of a Tyrone. Thus, Jamie escapes them as a sailorand returnssuffering of consumptionwithout a penny in the till. The fog is even moredepressing now. Edmond who critics believe to be Eugene O'Neill ,helps thenarration by drinking with his father, where each one gives a long speechabout their disillusions.They have no one else to blame but their pastlives and what do we do with our wrong doings of past ? Don't we all havesome long past wrong doings , haven't our parents taken the wrong choicessometimes? What are we supposed to do with them? Does the past hold in handthe right to ruin our present ? And if we allow it to happen , what willbecome of our future?

It's indeed a long journey taken by eachTyrone
It's a long,foggy voyage taken in Edmond's deep ocean and its very sad. Through the blurry minds of the four members of the Tyrone's we travel back into their pasts and follow their tragic flaw. EspeciallyMary's choice has destroyed her whole life. Even though she loves James , its obviousthat she has wasted her life by following his ambitions of becoming anactor and also has become a victim of his misery. James Tyrone is an oldman now who unfortunately has not been able to get rid of his childhood'sfears. The poverty that he suffered along with his three brothers hasturned him into a vicious man.Who can blame him?He has suffered a lot whenhe was only 10 years old. How can we deny the fact that only the ones whoexperience real poverty, do know it closely and are afraid of it. He doesnot dare spend a bit more of his money for his own son's health. Money ismore important than anything for him. Thus we see the couple lead theirchildren into an unsober life .Its almost as if the father is like a Tyrantinstead of a Tyrone. Thus, Jamie escapes them as a sailorand returnssuffering of consumptionwithout a penny in the till. The fog is even moredepressing now. Edmond who critics believe to be Eugene O'Neill ,helps thenarration by drinking with his father, where each one gives a long speechabout their disillusions.They have no one else to blame but their pastlives and what do we do with our wrong doings of past ? Don't we all havesome long past wrong doings , haven't our parents taken the wrong choicessometimes? What are we supposed to do with them? Does the past hold in handthe right to ruin our present ? And if we allow it to happen , what willbecome of our future?

shattering! a revelation of fragile human lives.
i don't think that the term 'enjoyable' can be attached to this poignant intensified private documentary of o'neill's life. what it is, is thought-provoking, humbling, heart-rending. one feels thoroughlyuncomfortable, to say the least, reading the text; as if one were peepingthrough a spy-hole at a forbidden scene but with the master of the housestanding behind one.

read it if you feel down in the dumps.

strangely, it promises a glimmer of hope in the enveloping 'fog' ofdespair.

Spiritual Nightfall
From the opening curtain, O'Neill's play relentlessly examines the disintegration of the lives of four people.It is a disturbing drama where love and hate co-exist in such close proximity that it is sometimes difficult to separate one from the other.

The story unfolds in the course of a single day, which begins with an emergence from the fog, both literally and figuratively and ends with the descent of the fog yet again, deeper, more profound, more isolating than ever.

The youngest son, Edmund is the pivot point for the story.The other members of his family revolve around the drama of his failing health.He is represented by his family as both the cause and the victim of his mother's return to her addiction, his jealous brother's attempts to destroy his chances for success and his father's dissatisfaction with his life.And he accepts the responsibility thrust on him, all the while recognizing, acknowledging that it is merely an excuse for failures and bad choices.

The family, despite their best efforts, is bound together, caught in a web of their own creation, unable to escape eventual destruction.It is a sad commentary of life, poignant and fascinating.In spite of some dated references, it still provides an insightful look at the human condition. ... Read more

Book Description
Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and the first American dramatist to receive a Nobel Prize, Eugene O'Neill filled his plays with rich characterization and innovative language, taking the outcasts and renegades of society and depicting their Olympian struggles with themselves-and with destiny. ... Read more

Book Description
This collection of thirty years of interviews with America'sonly Nobel Prize dramatist records his encounters with the press and givesa striking portrait of the man and the process of his publicmythologizing.

A profoundly private individual, O'Neill struggled throughout his life toovercome his intense discomfort with oral discourse as he responded to theprobings 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 in1920, when O'Neill was thirty-two. Serious American drama, for many, beganand, for many others, ended with Eugene O'Neill. This collection lends newtestimony to the truth of that assertion. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume of specially commissioned essays contains studies of O'Neill's life, his intellectual and creative forebears, and his relation to the theatrical world of his creative period, 1916-1942. Also included are descriptions of the O'Neill canon and its production history on stage and screen, and a series of essays on "special topics" related to the playwright. One of the essays speaks for those who are critical of O'Neill's work, and the volume concludes with an essay on O'Neill criticism containing a select bibliography of full-length studies of the playwright's work. ... Read more

Amazon.com
If at first you don't succeed... well, actually, Arthur and Barbara Gelb's 1962 book about Eugene O'Neill was a resounding success by any measure; for years, theirs was the definitive account of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and his work. Far from resting on their laurels, however, the Gelbs spent the next 38 years continuing their research, interviewing O'Neill's family and friends and digging up new sources of information. Now they've produced O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo, both a rewrite of their 1962 biography and a major literary event in its own right. The first installment of a projected trilogy, O'Neill uses the plays themselves as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the playwright's life, including substantial discussion of his colorful father, his Irish ancestors, and his troubled early years. This later work gains not only from its new source materials and widened scope but also from what the Gelbs note is a "changed sensibility"--both in themselves and the world around them. Those 38 intervening years have brought increased personal understanding and remarkable developments in O'Neill scholarship, they write, and O'Neill benefits from both. Marked by meticulous attention to detail and daring leaps in chronology, the Gelbs' biography is a remarkable reevaluation of one of our most violent and original American talents. --Greta Kline Book Description
A book destined not only to rewrite the life of America's greatest playwright but the history of biography as well.

Never before in the annals of American letters have biographers returned to their subject with the aim of radically rethinking and retelling their story form beginning to end.

Arthur and Barbara Gelb's O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo is the first volume of the completely rewritten biography of America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright. The Gelbs originally published the first full-scale life of the dramatist in 1962, nine years after his death. In the intervening thirty-eight years, they have conducted extensive interviews and have unearthed masses of hitherto unknown or withheld material--letters, diaries, scenarios--from which they have fashioned this supremely definitive life of O'Neill.

The Gelbs take O'Neill from his lonely childhood through his seafaring, adventure-filled and often self-destructive youth. This new research and perspective probes O'Neill's psychological torment over his mother's rejection and his father's benevolent tyranny, his suicide attempt, his struggle with alcoholism, and his tumultuous love affairs. This first volume follows O'Neill to his first triumph on Broadway with Beyond the Horizon that set him on the path toward the ultimate brilliant achievements of The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and what is universally regarded as America's greatest play, Long Day's Journey into Night.

"Brilliantly researched and written. . . . The story is as powerful as any O'Neill play. . . ."--Los Angeles Times

Illustrated with black-and-white photo-inserts ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Incredible biography
This revised version of the Gelb's famous biography from the sixties is an incredible read.It traces the life of O'Neill from his early beginningsto his first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon.One gets an in-depth viewof his life with his parents and brother.Monte Cristo provides the modernreader with an enriched biographical background that really elucidatesaspects of O'Neill's masterwork, Long Day's Journey Into Night.Thisbiography is clearly written, thoughtful, provocative, and interesting. It's definitely one of the great literary biographies of an Americanwriter. ... Read more

Book Description
Eugene O'Neill, one of America's most gifted and prolific playwrights, wrote more than 60 plays between 1914 and 1941, a level of creativity paralleled in modern times only by Bernard Shaw.The progress of his art from experimental one-act plays to the monumental tragedies of his later years
is a story as dramatic and compelling as that of his tortured personal history.Combining the two, Professor Bogard traces the contours of O'Neill's life in his art.By discussing, in their approximate order of composition, the published and unpublished works, Bogard illuminates not only the
plays, but also the literary, aesthetic, and historical influences on the playwright's development.For the revised edition of this insightful, meticulously written work, the author has added new and unpublished material on A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed, a cycle of eleven plays written by
O'Neill during the 1930s and '40s, only one of which he readied for the stage.Among the plays in this cycle that have been posthumously produced are More Stately Mansions (New York, 1967) and A Touch of the Poet (New York, 1958). ... Read more

Book Description
These three plays exemplify Eugene O'Neil's ability to explore the limits of the human predicament, even as he sounds the depths of his audiences' hearts. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Desire Under the Elms
Its the only play i read in the book.It was an interesting read.The dialect is sometimes hard to understand, only a few words though.
The play is fast moving and interesting.The scandalous Eben-???(dont want to ruin it for you) relationship is unexpected and dramatic.Perhaps too dramatic, in a rome and juliet complex.

mourning becomes elektra
Oneill, death death death, this is rereleased in vintage 1958,
mourning becomes electra , strange interlude, required reading
for all playwrights of our era.

THREE MASTERPIECES
Each of the three plays in this volume are beautiful in their own way, with a poignant message that you'll be the better for hearing. O'Neill's genius is breathtaking and sometimes I wonder how he does it. Out of all his plays, there's not a stinker in the bunch.

need some ideas
i need a thesis for a paper on strange interlud

Three great and rarely performed plays by Eugene O'Neill
One of these three great plays by Eugene O'Neillis Strange Interlude which was written in 1923 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 when it originally ran on Broadway.Its running time is over four hours and it isusually performed with a dinner break.It is a family chronicle, of sorts,following the life of Nina Leeds and her family in a small university townin New England - from her early days as a young woman mourning the loss ofher ideal lover during WWI, through her middle age years.It is the storyof a family's secret and their determination to keep this secret unknown byothers, and sometimes even to themselves.The play's most unusual quality,though, is found in the words that each character speaks.Not only do theyconverse with each other using naturalistic dialogue, but they also voicetheir subtext, which is unheard by the other characters in the play, but isheard by the audience.This device brings to the surface the secret lifethat each character in the play carries with them but is not willing toreveal to others.It creates, in the audience, as if it were anothercharacter in the play, a "sharer" of these stage characters'secrets.Through it all we view the lives of these characters with afondness, and we root for them. Perhaps we root for them because we know,very much, why they are doing the things they do to each other.

The twoother plays are well worth the experience of reading and/or seeing onstage.Mourning Becomes Electra, based on the Greek Electra myth, isespecially wonderful.Its set in post civil war america and like StrangeInterlude its length makes it a rare theatre treat to see performed onstage. ... Read more