Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts

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.)