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Description
The most lauded playwright in American history, Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) won four Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize for a body of work that includes The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electra, Desire Under the Elms, and Long Day's Journey into Night. His life, the direct source for so much of his art, was one of personal tumult from the very beginning. The son of a famous actor and a quiet, morphine-addicted mother, O'Neill had experienced alcoholism, a collapse of his health, and bouts show more of mania while still a young man. Based on years of extensive research and access to previously untapped sources, Sheaffer's authoritative biography examines how the pain of O'Neill's childhood fed his desire to write dramas and affected his artistically successful and emotionally disastrous life. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Very exhaustive and occasionally exhausting, like O'Neill himself. The man who transformed American drama decided to transform experience by injecting drama into as much of his own life as he could manage, wearing out family, friends, colleagues and himself in the process. Sheaffer alone seems untired.
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Author Information
8 Works 145 Members
Former reporter, theater critic, and press agent, Louis Sheaffer (1912-1997) also wrote O'Neill: Son and Playwright
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Series
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1973
- People/Characters
- Eugene O'Neill
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Biography & Memoir, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 812.5 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American drama in English 20th Century
- LCC
- PS3529 .N5 .Z797 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1900-1960
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 72
- Popularity
- 436,321
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.67)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 3
