This study explores the personal, historical, and artistic influences that combined to form such dark and influential American masterpieces as 'The Iceman Cometh', 'The Emperor Jones', 'Mourning Becomes Electra', 'Hughie', and - arguably the finest tragedy ever written by an American - 'Long Day's Journey into Night'.

Arthur Miller, best known for his works The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, is one of America's most important dramatists.

Specially commissioned essays explore the life and work of Eugene O'Neill from his earliest writings to Long Day's Journey Into Night.

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American upbringing and lifelong torment over losing faith in God; his vital role in African American cultural history; unpublished photographs, including a unique offstage picture of him with his lover Louise Bryant; new evidence of O’Neill’s desire to become a novelist and what this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

Eugene O'Neill was one of the great American playwrights of the twentieth century. Spanning the years 1910-1930, the 14 essays in this volume address the milieu he knew best--his friends in bohemian Greenwich Village, Provincetown, on waterfronts around the globe, and in the other beloved communities that comprised his early circle. At a time when O'Neill's creative powers were in their infancy, these influences formed the backdrop of his creative development and, consequently, demand more intensive study than they have received to date. This collection also highlights the larger modernist period and its impact on the First World War, the Little Theater Movement, the Abbey Players of Dublin, philosophical anarchism, and other contemporary upheavals that permeate his drama. Interspersed with rare period photos and illustrations, this volume contextualizes O'Neill's plays in the tumult of his historical and cultural moment, offering scholars a fresh approach to his life and art.

This book demonstrates Eugene O’Neill’s use of philosophy in the early period of his work and provides analyses of selected works from that era, concluding with The Hairy Ape, completed in 1921, as an illustration of the mastery he had achieved in dramatizing key concepts of philosophy. Analyses of one-act and full-length plays from 1913 to 1921 reveal the influence of the three philosophers and establish that O’Neill was fundamentally a philosophic playwright, even from his earliest dramatic sketches. Specific concepts from Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche went into O’Neill’s shaping of character arcs, dramatic circumstances, symbology, and theme. Among them are Schopenhauer’s concept of will and representation, Stirner’s notion of possession, and Nietzsche’s principle of the Apollonian–Dionysian duality. These ideas were foundational to O’Neill’s construction of tragic irony apparent in his early period plays. The critical concepts of these three philosophers are the major pathways in this study. However, such an approach inevitably reveals other layers of spiritual influence, such as Catholicism and Eastern philosophy, which are touched on in these analyses. This book is a much-needed introduction to philosophic concepts in Eugene O’Neill’s early work and would be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre studies and philosophy.

Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900 – 2000 is a ground-breaking survey, tracking the advent of modern drama in Japan, India, China, Korea and Southeast Asia. It considers the shaping power of realism and naturalism, the influence of Western culture, the relationship between theatrical modernisation and social modernisation, and how theatre operates in contemporary Asian society. Organised by period, nation and region, each chapter provides: ·a historical overview of the culture; ·an outline of theatre history; ·a survey of significant playwrights, actors, directors, companies, plays and productions. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this authoritative introduction will uniquely equip students and scholars with a broad understanding of the modern theatre histories of Asia.