Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy

by Stephen A. Black

Book Overview

Within little more than three years of the opening of his first successful play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill endured the deaths of his father, mother, and brother. These devastating losses plunged the young playwright into a period of guilt and profound mourning that consumed two decades of his life. In this enlightening critical biography, deeply informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, Stephen Black presents a new understanding of Eugene O'Neill's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300093993
• ISBN13: 9780300093995
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 600 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

O'Neill's long day's journey on Black's couch.

It has been nearly fifty years since Eugene O'Neill's death. Much has been written about him since that time. In his new biography, Stephen Black insightfully analyzes the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning dramatist and his work. Black is an English professor with training as a psychoanalytic therapist. The "thesis" of his biography, Black writes, "is that O'Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning" (p. xvi). O'Neill, he contends, used playwriting as a means of self-therapy.Black's 543-page biography is filled with interesting information about his subject's troubled life. We learn, for instance, O'Neill was born in a hotel room in 1888, and died in a hotel room in 1953. In between, he lived "a life of earthly and psychic wandering" (p. 43). At the time of his birth, O'Neill's mother became addicted to morphine, for which he blamed himself. As a mother, Ella O'Neill was "lonely" and "inadequate" (pp. 48, 51). O'Neill's father, an actor, was "revered," though "distant" (p. 47). O'Neill's estranged daughter, Oona, married Charlie Chaplin when she was 17. Chaplin was 54, and two month's younger than O'Neill. We learn that O'Neill's life was plagued with, among other things (and the list is long), illness, depression, alcoholism, family tension, unhappy marriages, and one devastating death after another. Truly, it is a wonder O'Neill ever found his way through the obstacles in his life to write four Pulitzer Prize winning plays, and to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936.Black's book also contains plenty of perceptive commentary about O'Neill's plays. It ends with an impressive bibliography. Although I occasionally found O'Neill spending too much time on Black's couch in this psychoanalytical biography, this is nevertheless a worthwhile book for anyone interested in the playwright or his writing.G. Merritt

outstanding psychoanalytic interpretation

Stephen A. Black has assembled an extraordinary range of materials to provide the first comprehensive psychoanalysis of O'Neill. Others have offered fragmentary perspectives, or analyses based on a little reading in psychoanalytic theory, but Black brings his experience as a trained analyst (as well as a literary scholar) to a through review of the historical documents. It must have been harrowing work for him, but we all stand to benefit from his having gone into the very mouth of a hellish psyche. (Hmmm... not so sure about that metaphor.) Anyway, it's a terrific book.