| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780679763963 | | Publisher: Vintage Books | | Publish Date: 11/1/1995 | | Buy.com Sku: 30119038 | | Item#: R7TDRK | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.25L x 1T |
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| | | 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.
Annotation:
Three plays by Eugene O'Neill: "Desire Under the Elms," "Strange Interlude," and "Mourning Becomes Electra."
| Author Bio| Eugene O'Neill | | Eugene O'Neill is universally renowned as the first great American dramatist, and fifty years after his death, his work remains at the forefront of American theater. He won the Pulitzer Prize for drama an unprecedented four times and was the first (and, as of 2009, the only) American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for literature. O'Neill was literally born on Broadway, in a hotel on Times Square in 1888, and he spent the earliest years of his life traveling across America with his parents, as his father was an actor in a traveling production. After attending Catholic boarding school, he was accepted to Princeton University, though he left after being suspended in his freshman year. O'Neill spent several years as a self-professed "tramp," including a stint prospecting gold in Honduras and several voyages at sea. During these aimless years of self-discovery, O'Neill barely survived a bout of malaria and a suicide attempt brought on by his alcoholism. In 1912, O'Neill contracted tuberculosis, forcing him to inter himself at a sanitarium, where he wiled away the hours by immersing himself in the works of modern playwrights, such as Anton Chekov, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg, who were creating a new strand of drama known as tragic realism. O'Neill soon became associated with a theater group in Massachusetts known as the Provincetown Players, and theatrical lore reports that he arrived at the home used as the group's headquarters and announced that he had a trunk full of plays, which were immediately read and recognized as brilliant. After several idyllic years of earnest work in Provincetown, O'Neill's first full-length play, BEYOND THE HORIZON, opened in New York in 1920, and earned him the first of his four Pulitzers. He won again for ANNA CHRISTIE in 1922, STRANGE INTERLUDE in 1928, and posthumously for THE LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT in 1957. In 1936, O'Neill was honored with the Nobel Prize for literature, but the award prompted a critical backlash which caused him to enact a self-inflicted exile from the theater which lasted a little over a decade, until he again conquered Broadway with THE ICEMAN COMETH in 1946. Despite his repeated triumphs on the stage, O'Neill's personal life was marked by the same turmoil he often inflicted on his protagonists, as his first two marriages dissolved as a result of his drinking and infidelity, and he fared no better with his three children. His eldest son, Eugene Jr., committed suicide in 1950, his second son Shane became a heroin addict, and in 1943 he disowned his 18-year-old daughter Oona, after she married film legend Charlie Chaplin who, at 54, was exactly three times her age. |In his later years, O'Neill suffered from cerebellar abiotrophy, a rare brain disorder which prevented him from writing, and he died, as he was born, in a hotel room in 1953. |
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