The only American dramatist awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Eugene O’Neill wrote with poetic expressiveness, emotional intensity, and immense dramatic power. On the centenary of his birth The Library of America is publishing the first complete collection of O’Neill's plays. This vol^e, the second of three, contains 13 plays written between 1920 and 1931, years in which O’Neill achieved his greatest popularity while experimenting with a wide variety of subjects and styles.
In Difrent, The Fint Mtut, and We№d, egotistical characters havt: their illusions about l^« shaken by the force of other people's desires. All Cod’s Chilun (Got Wings depicts the web of racial hatreds and spiritual longings that surround the marriage of a black man and a white woman.
The Ftrnntllin tells of Ponce de Leon's search for the fountain of youth. Mww Millions satirizes American materialism by ^xtraying Marco Polo as a hustling businessman blind to the riches of Eastern culture.
^Llhed shows its Biblical hero preaching l^<M: laughter, and the defeat of death.
The stoker Yank in The HtlliryApe, the architect Dion Anthony in The Great ^od B^rown, and the minister’s son Reuben Light in al try to find a place for
themselves in an increasingly soulless and mechanistic world. Yank. believes that he “belongs” in his stokehold until a terrified heiress calls him a “filthy beast? His rage turns to despair as he encounters a brutally indifferent society onshore. The Great God B^rown ^es masks to depict the divided ^souls of its hero, his wife, ^ul his alter ego, the successful businessman William Brow™.
Betrayed by his mother:, Reuben Light forsakes the God of his father for the new electrical god of the dynamo but finds no escape from the s^aial conflicts that O’Neill characteristically inte^wines with his hero's religious doubts.
Strange Interlude follows its heroine Nina Leeds through nine and 25 years of passionate pain-
ful involvement with three men. Inspired by contemporary psychology, the novels ofJames Joyce, and the soliloquies of the Elizabethan theater, O’Neill uses spoken asides to reveal the shifting of his charac
ters' inner thoughts. His most commercially successful play, it won him his third Pulitzer P^k.
Ephraim Cabot, the patriarchal farmer in Desire Undn- the Elms, believes in a God as hard as the stony ground he works. He takes as his third wife sensual Abbie Pumam, who covets both his land and his resentful son Eben, unleashing passions that move with stark inexorability toward their ^^^ment. In Mourning Becomes Electra murderous lusts and hatreds wreak ha^^uponthe proud M^mon family, leaving the survivors pursued not by the avenging Furies of Greek myth but by their own scourging consciences. Searching desperately for peace, they repeatedly confront the temptation to choose oblivion that haunt many of O’Neill's last plays.
Travis Bogard, editor of this vol^e, is emeritus professor of dldramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, author of COmtour in Time: Plays of Eugene OWeil, editor of The Unl^^m ^CYNeil, and co-editor of Seleaed ^Letters of Eugene O'Neil.
