Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Doris Alexander
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271041021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
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.

Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 902

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Book Description
The settings range from a native-ruled island in the west Indies to a university town in New England, but the theme is universal--the eternal tragedy of man caught in passionate conflict between aspiration and frustration. O'Neill's plays explore man's continuing need to give the conflict of his life some meaning beyond itself, to find some justification for the importance which it has for him; the plays themselves are efforts to achieve a self-justifying dignity and grandeur.

Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1180

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Book Description
A wire for Live, the Web, thirst, recklessness, warnings, fog, bread and butter, Bound East for Cardiff, aAbortion, the movie man, servitude, the sniper, the personal eqauation, before breakfast, now I ask you, in the zone, ile, the long voyage home, the moon of the caribbees, the robe, beyond the horizon, shell shock, the dreamy kid, where the cross is made, the straw, Chris Christophersen, gold, anna Christie, and the Emperor Jones.

Author: Travis Bogard
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195053419
Category : Dramatists, American
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This study attempts to trace Eugene O'Neill's theatrical contour from its origin to its end, by discussing each of his works in the approximate chronological order of composition. The book is thus a form of biography, although it pays no heed to those events of O'Neill's life that did not have direct bearing on his professional career. By virtue of O'Neill's central position in the drama of the modern world, this study also has become, within the limits its subject sets for it, a form of theatrical history. An appendix contains a complete factual record of important productions of O'Neill's plays. ISBN 0-19-504548-3 (pbk.): $12.95.

Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300190182
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
divEugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as his masterpiece and a classic of American drama. With this new edition, at last it has the critical edition that it deserves. William Davies King provides students and theater artists with an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; glosses of literary allusions and quotations; notes on the performance history; an annotated bibliography; and illustrations. "This is a worthy new edition, one that I'm sure will appeal to many students and teachers. William Davies King provides a thoughtful introduction to Long Day's Journey into Night—equally sensitive to the most particular and most encompassing of the play's materials."—Marc Robinson/DIV

Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Broadway Play Publishing
ISBN: 9780881451818
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
This collection contains Eugene O'Neill's first three full-length plays: BEYOND THE HORIZON, THE EMPEROR JONES, and ANNA CHRISTIE. BEYOND THE HORIZON: Winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "...an absorbing, significant, and memorable tragedy... ...a playwright of real power and imagination... ...the play has greatness in it and marks O'Neill as one of our foremost playwrights...." Alexander Woolcott, Times "Only once or twice in the course of the dramatic season does a playof such terrific force and such simple directness award the patient theatrical chroniclers..." Robert Gilbert Welsh, Evening Telegram "...this season's most notable play of a serious theme and purpose by an American author...." World THE EMPEROR JONES: "...for strength and originality [O'Neill] has no rivals among the American writers for the stage." Alexander Woolcott, Times "An odd and extraordinary play, written with imaginative genius..." Kenneth Macgowan, Globe "...the most interesting play which has yet come from the most promising playwright in America..." Heywood Broun, Tribune ANNA CHRISTIE: Winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "...a rich and salty play that grips the attention with the rise of the first curtain and holds it fiercely to the end.... A play written with that abundant imagination, that fresh and venturesome mind and that sure instinct for the theatre which set this young author apart...." Alexander Woollcott, Times

Author: Robert M. Dowling
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300210590
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book 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

Author: Arthur Gelb
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399159118
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 922

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Book Description
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.”

Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780394718569
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
The action of the seven one-act plays takes place in the years preceding World War I