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

Sickness, starvation, brutality, and forced labour plagued the existence of tens of thousands of Allied POWs in World War II. More than a quarter of these POWs died in captivity. Long Night’s Journey into Day centres on the lives of Canadian, British, Indian, and Hong Kong POWs captured at Hong Kong in December 1941 and incarcerated in camps in Hong Kong and the Japanese Home Islands. Experiences of American POWs in the Philippines, and British and Australians POWs in Singapore, are interwoven throughout the book. Starvation and diseases such as diphtheria, beriberi, dysentery, and tuberculosis afflicted all these unfortunate men, affecting their lives not only in the camps during the war but after they returned home. Yet despite the dispiriting circumstances of their captivity, these men found ways to improve their existence, keeping up their morale with such events as musical concerts and entertainments created entirely within the various camps. Based largely on hundreds of interviews with former POWs, as well as material culled from archives around the world, Professor Roland details the extremes the prisoners endured — from having to eat fattened maggots in order to live to choosing starvation by trading away their skimpy rations for cigarettes. No previous book has shown the essential relationship between almost universal ill health and POW life and death, or provides such a complete and unbiased account of POW life in the Far East in the 1940s.

Presents a collection of critical essays on O'Neill's play, arranged in chronological order of their original publication.

In Burning the Midnight Oil, word-wrangler extraordinaire Phil Cousineau has gathered an eclectic and electric collection of soulful poems and prose from great thinkers throughout the ages. Whether beguiling readers with glorious poetry or consoling them with prayers from fellow restless souls, Cousineau can relieve any insomniac's unease. From St. John of the Cross to Annie Dillard, Beethoven to The Song of Songs, this refreshingly insightful anthology soothes and inspires all who struggle through the dark of the night. These "night thoughts" vividly illustrate Alfred North Whitehead's liberating description of "what we do without solitude" and also evoke Henry David Thoreau's reverie, "Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake." The night writers in Cousineau's vesperal collection range from saints, poets, and shamans to astronomers and naturalists, and tells of ancient tales and shining passages from the most brilliant (albeit insomniac) writers of today. These poetic ponderances sing of the falling darkness, revel in dream-time, convey the ache of melancholy, conspire against sleeplessness, vanquish loneliness, contemplate the night sky, rhapsodize on love, and languorously greet the first rays of dawn. Notable night owls include Rabandranath Tagore, Mary Oliver, Manley Hopkins, Jorge Borges and William Blake.

A play set in 1912 at the summer home of a family whose members confront their own guilts and failures.

A Long Night's Journey into Day is the story of a young boy growing up in Nazi Germany. At first, he is seduced by the propaganda and glitter of the Thousand Year Reich as Adolf Hitler liked to refer to his rule, but the guidance of his parents and a slowly growing awareness of the bigotry and brutality of the regime saved him from being wholly taken in by the ever-present indoctrination into the ideology of Nazism. The book ends with a defense of democracy as a bulwark against unchecked evil in government and with a passionate repudiation of all forms of prejudice and racism.