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Title: Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy by Stephen A. Black ISBN: 0-300-09399-3 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: O'Neill's long day's journey on Black's couch.
Comment: 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
Rating: 5
Summary: outstanding psychoanalytic interpretation
Comment: 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.
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Title: O'Neill: Life With Monte Cristo by Arthur Gelb, Barbara Gelb ISBN: 0399149120 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group (Paper) Pub. Date: 18 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill by Michael Manheim ISBN: 0521556457 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 24 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: O'Neill: Son and Playwright by Louis Sheaffer, Louis Scheaffer ISBN: 0815412436 Publisher: Cooper Square Press Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Long Day's Journey into Night, Second edition by Eugene O´Neill, Harold Bloom ISBN: 0300093055 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title:Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night": A Study Guide from Gale's "Drama for Students" ASIN: B00006G394 Publisher: The Gale Group Pub. Date: 23 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $3.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $3.95 |
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