Eugene O'Neill
A Life in Four Acts
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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American upbringing and lifelong torment over losing faith in God; his vital role in African American cultural history; unpublished photographs, including a unique offstage picture of him with his lover Louise Bryant; new evidence of O'Neill's desire to become a novelist and what this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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A self-described "tragic optimist," O'Neill, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for drama and the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize, is thoroughly anatomized in this absorbing biography. Dowling, an English professor and board member of the Eugene O'Neill Society, begins with O'Neill's upbringing amid theatrical royalty his father, James, was regarded as one of his generation's greatest actors and subsequent rebellion against the era's theatrical conventions. Falling in with the Provincetown Players in 1916, he wrote a series of frank, unsettling plays first staged between 1920 and 1924 The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie, among them that revolutionized American theater even while angering the guardians of public morality. Dowling provides insightful interpretations of O'Neill's lesser-known plays that give context for the masterpieces, and draws extensively from letters, diaries, and memoirs that tell this story in O'Neill's own words and those of his associates. The book unflinchingly explores the darkness that dominated O'Neill's life O'Neill and his brother, Jim, were chronic alcoholics, his mother Ella was a morphine addict, and Eugene was a negligent husband and father and emerged in his most autobiographical works, including The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. As portrayed by Dowling, O'Neill was an artist dedicated to channeling his hatreds and the demons that dogged him into works of creative genius. 49 b&w illus.
