Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

Overview

A major new biography of Eugene O'Neill, the Nobel Prize–winning dramatist who revolutionized American theater

“Restores balance to the slightly skewed twenty-first century reputation of America’s greatest playwright. . . . [An] important story, perceptively recounted.”—Wendy Smith, Washington Post

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

This extraordinary new biography fully captures the intimacies of Eugene O’Neill’s tumultuous life and the profound impact of his work on American drama. Robert M. Dowling innovatively recounts O’Neill’s life in four acts, thus highlighting how the stories he told for the stage interweave with his actual life stories. Each episode also uncovers how O’Neill’s work was utterly intertwined with, and galvanized by, 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Irish upbringing and lifelong torment over losing faith in God; his vital role in African American cultural history; unpublished photographs, including a unique offstage picture of him with his lover Louise Bryant; new evidence of O’Neill’s desire to become a novelist and what this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 lively informality yet a scholar’s strict accuracy, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is a biography that America’s foremost playwright richly deserves.

 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300219715
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/22/2016
Pages:	584
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Robert M. Dowling is professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He has published extensively on O’Neill and serves on the board of directors of the Eugene O’Neill Society.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue: The Irish Luck Kid, 1916 1

Introduction: "Life Is a Tragedy-Hurrah!" 9

Act I The Ghosts at the Stage Door 27

The Treasures of Monte Cristo

School Days of an Apostate

Anarchist in the Tropics

Exorcism in New York

Return to Monte Cristo

The (Love) Sick Apprentice

It Takes a Village

Act II "To Be an Artist or Nothing" 125

Washed Ashore at Land's End

Below Washington Square

"Turn Back the Universe"

"The Town Is Yours"

Civilization Unmasked

The Theatre F(r)eud

Act III "The Broadway Show Shop" 241

Prometheus Unbound

Draining Bitter Cups

Note to the Ku Klux Klan

"God's Hard, Not Easy"

The Novelist behind the Mask

"Old Doc" at Loon Lodge

The Soliloquy Is Dead! Long Live-What?

Act IV Full Fathom Five 351

Uncharted Seas

L'Aeschylus du Plessis

The Prodigal Returns

"The Game Isn't Worth the Candle"

Pandora's Box

The Tyranny of Time

Silence's End

"There's a Lot to Be Said for Being Dead"

Postscript: Journey Into Light 473

Appendix: Selected Chronology of Works (Date Completed) 487

Notes 491

Index 555

Interviews

Q: You have long been a fan of O’Neill’s work, but what prompted you to write a book about his life?
 
A: In the final session of the first O’Neill seminar I taught, I asked my students, "Which plays did you enjoy the most?” Without missing a beat, one raised his hand and said that O’Neill’s life was his greatest play. Many others nodded in agreement. That moment planted the seed for this book. It turns out that the dramatic structure of O’Neill’s life uncannily matches that of his best plays. And, even more fascinating for a biographer, nearly every fictional story O’Neill told interweaves with actual stories from his own life.
 
Q: O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature—the only American playwright to do so. How is his literary achievement viewed today, some 60 years after his death?
 
A:  O’Neill also won four Pulitzers, yet he probably received more bad reviews than any other major American author. However, having scrutinized virtually every review of his premieres and books, I can say that even his so-called clunkers were still credited with breakthroughs that offered something unique, something never before attempted on the American stage.
 
O’Neill is enjoying a new “renaissance,” with dozens of revivals over the past decade. American and international audiences alike show an unquenchable desire for his plays, and there’s no end in sight for this playwright’s potential to speak to contemporary audiences as he once spoke to his own.

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/29/2014
A self-described “tragic optimist,” O’Neill, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for drama and the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize, is thoroughly anatomized in this absorbing biography. Dowling, an English professor and board member of the Eugene O’Neill Society, begins with O’Neill’s upbringing amid theatrical royalty—his father, James, was regarded as one of his generation’s greatest actors—and subsequent rebellion against the era’s theatrical conventions. Falling in with the Provincetown Players in 1916, he wrote a series of frank, unsettling plays first staged between 1920 and 1924—The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie, among them—that revolutionized American theater even while angering the guardians of public morality. Dowling provides insightful interpretations of O’Neill’s lesser-known plays that give context for the masterpieces, and draws extensively from letters, diaries, and memoirs that tell this story in O’Neill’s own words and those of his associates. The book unflinchingly explores the darkness that dominated O’Neill’s life—O’Neill and his brother, Jim, were chronic alcoholics, his mother Ella was a morphine addict, and Eugene was a negligent husband and father—and emerged in his most autobiographical works, including The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. As portrayed by Dowling, O’Neill was an artist dedicated to channeling his hatreds and the demons that dogged him into works of creative genius. 49 b&w illus. Agent: Geri Thoma, Elaine Markson Literary Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A worthy successor to previous major biographies . . . Dowling has such a strong grasp of O’Neill’s temperament and predilections and conveys a refreshingly demystified sense of his personal dealings . . . Along with some important new findings, Dowling has given us an O’Neill very much of his own time as well as one for ours.”—Kurt Eisen, Eugene O'Neill Review

Eugene O'Neill Review - Kurt Eisen

Scrupulously researched and elegantly written . . . A life that feels like one of [O’Neill’s] epic tragic-comic plays . . . required reading for anyone in the theater.” —Nathan Lane, New York Times (“By the Book”)

New York Times - Nathan Lane

"Indispensable"—John Simon, Weekly Standard

Weekly Standard - John Simon

A passionate, informed author, Dowling writes the story with his blood. His palpable affection and empathy for his subject allows him to expose the tortured journey of this complicated life, giving us profound insight into the incomparable dramas of Eugene O’Neill. What sets this biography apart from others on the playwright is that it comes from a gifted disciple who identifies with his subject and brings an Irish storyteller’s sensibility that feels altogether authentic. Staging the works of O’Neill is my passion. I have now found my handbook.”—CIARÁN O’REILLY, Irish Repertory Theatre

Ciaran O'Reilly

Dowling has written the single most complete and up-to-date account of O’Neill’s life that we have….To call his scholarship ‘sound’ is vastly to understate it; his accomplishment in marshalling all this disparate and often obscure material into a well-organized and highly readable account is nothing less than astonishing.”—JACKSON R. BRYER, co-editor of Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill

Jackson R. Bryer

Dowling . . . effortlessly guides the reader through O’Neill’s fascinating life . . . [A] complex, captivating narrative.”—Caitlin Mattera, Key Reporter

Key Reporter - Caitlin Mattera

Smoothly engaging . . . [the] O’Neill biography to read.”—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly

Open Letters Monthly - Steve Donoghue

A biography that equals its predecessors and, in the eye of this reader, supersedes them . . . Dowling peels away hearsay in favor of proven accuracy and the result is a memorable portrait . . . An important addition to O’Neill scholarship.”—James Fisher, TLA (Theatre Library Association) Online

TLA Online - James Fisher

"[A] richly drawn portrait . . . neither a hagiography nor a takedown . . . As a biographer, Dowling is generous and inclusive."—Rachel Shteir, Bookforum

Bookforum - Rachel Shteir

Fast-paced, highly readable . . . a powerful narrative, with a fresh perspective . . . building to a devastating last act.”—Joe Dowling, Irish Times

Irish Times - Joe Dowling

Robert M. Dowling’s thoughtful book restores balance to the slightly skewed twenty-first century reputation of America’s greatest playwright. . . . [An] important story, perceptively recounted.”—Wendy Smith, Washington Post

Washington Post - Wendy Smith

Indispensable”—Andrea Simakis, Cleveland Plain Dealer

Cleveland Plain Dealer - Andrea Simakis

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Biography category.

L.A. Times - Book Prize

'O’Neill’s struggle to wrench American theatre into splendour, fear and greatness is the subject of Robert M. Dowling’s excellent new life of the playwright, which elegantly balances knowledgeable readings of the plays and their social content with O’Neill’s famously turbulent life.'—Sarah Churchwell, The Spectator

The Spectator - Sarah Churchwell

'Most writers’ lives are slow, deskbound things; O’Neill’s life, by contrast, was crammed with incident. Robert M. Dowling, a world expert on him, tells his story with pace and narrative skill, never getting bogged down in plot exposition or textual analysis.'—John Walsh, The Sunday Times

The Sunday Times - John Walsh

"Dowling's brilliant, unvarnished yet compassionate biography, written with verve and based on exciting new research, depicts how O'Neill transmogrified his personal agonies and triumphs into the greatest American drama of the 20th century. A definitive portrait."—J. MICHAEL LENNON, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life 

J. Michael Lennon

It’s astonishing to see that the life of Eugene O’Neill lives up to the plays.  He charged through the first half of the twentieth century like a man on fire, lighting up the American stage with blistering, poetic dramas that won for him a huge and grateful audience, even the Nobel Prize for Literature. Robert M. Dowling is equal to the task here, a biographer who writes with a novelist’s sense of narrative momentum. In fluid prose, he summons the wild, intense, sad, and comic world of O’Neill with empathy and profound critical intelligence. This life of O’Neill will last.”—JAY PARINI, author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Final Year

Jay Parini

This dutiful biography gives us more insight into the man, the women in his life, [and] the people who governed his place in American theatre.”—Tony Vellela, Intermission Talk

Intermission Talk - Tony Vellela

[A] clear-eyed, just-the-facts biography . . . Dowling brings all [O’Neill’s] herculean activity vividly to life.”—Ray Olson, Booklist

Booklist - Ray Olson

11/15/2014
As O'Neill scholar Dowling (English, Central Connecticut State Univ.) makes clear in this biography's title, the connection between the playwright's life and work takes center stage. In plays such as Long Day's Journey into Night the synthesis is obvious. The real depth of scholarship shows in tying expressionistic pieces, for example, The Hairy Ape and The Great God Brown to O'Neill's psyche. The facts of the playwright's private life are by and large sordid and the biographer does not shy away from depicting the physical and psychological abuse that the great pioneer of the American avant-garde stage heaped on friends and family alike. The volume also serves to reveal the latest discoveries in O'Neill scholarship, including previously unpublished poetry, his desire to abandon the theater to write novels exclusively, and, perhaps most valuable, the legal machinations and petty jealousies that led to the early release of his masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night. VERDICT A well-rounded portrait of the playwright that can serve as a comprehensive introduction while also considering previously unknown facets of O'Neill's life and work.—John Frank, Los Angeles P.L.

Library Journal

2014-08-18
A portrait of a playwright inspired by suffering. When Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began writing plays in 1913, American theater featured hackneyed melodramas with audience-pleasing happy endings. O'Neill's dark themes—oppression, racism, alienation—and innovative staging revolutionized the genre, paving the way for such later iconoclasts as Tennessee Williams and Thornton Wilder. In this authoritative biography, Dowling (English/Central Connecticut State Univ.; co-author, Critical Companion to Eugene O'Neill, 2009, etc.) traces the trajectory of O'Neill's career: his two semesters in George Baker's noted playwriting seminar at Harvard; his professional growth with the Provincetown Players; the production of his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon (1920), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and his prolific output for the next two decades, including the Pulitzer-winning Anna Christie (1920) and Strange Interlude (1927) and ending with A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943) and the posthumous production of Long Day's Journey into Night (1956). Critical acclaim did not assuage the demons that haunted O'Neill from childhood, however. Desperately lonely, "besieged by hideous attacks of rage, guilt, and fear," he drank. "The stranglehold alcoholism had taken over O'Neill by the early twenties is nearly impossible to overstate," Dowling writes. He felt spiritually and emotionally bereft. He was married three times, the last to the domineering Carlotta Monterey, who vowed to "construct a fortress around her husband" to protect him from annoyances, including his children from previous marriages. Both sons committed suicide. His daughter, Oona, who eloped with Charlie Chaplin when she was 18, also succumbed to alcoholism. O'Neill was stridently critical of America, calling it "the greatest failure….Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside of it…." Although O'Neill claimed he was a "tragic optimist," Dowling's sympathetic, comprehensive portrait reveals a man beset by self-hatred and despair, struggling—and failing—to find salvation.

Kirkus Reviews