The only American dramatist awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Eugene O'Neill wrote with poetic expressiveness, emotional intensity,
and immense dramatic power. This Library of America volume (the first in
a three-volume set) contains twenty-nine plays he wrote between 1913,
when he began his career, and 1920, the year he first achieved Broadway
success.
Many of O'Neill's early plays are one-act melodramas whose characters
are caught in extreme situations. Thirst and Fog depict shipwreck
survivors, The Web a young mother trapped in the New York underworld,
and Abortion the aftermath of a college student's affair with a
stenographer.
His first distinctive works are four one-act plays about the crew of the
tramp steamer Glencairn that render sailors' speech with masterful
faithfulness. Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage
Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees portray these "children of the
sea" as they watch over a dying man, sail though submarine-patrolled
waters, take their shore leave in a London dive, and drink rum in a
moonlit tropical anchorage.
In Beyond the Horizon Robert Mayo begins a tragic chain of events by
abandoning his dream of a life at sea, choosing instead to marry the
woman his brother loves and remain on his family farm. The sea in "Anna
Christie" is both "dat ole devil" to coal barge captain Chris
Christopherson and a source of spiritual cleansing to his daughter Anna,
an embittered prostitute. When a swaggering stoker falls in love with
her, Anna becomes the apex of a three-sided struggle full of enraged
pride, grim foreboding, and stubborn hope. Both of these plays won the
Pulitzer Prize and helped establish O'Neill as a successful Broadway
playwright.
The Emperor Jones depicts the nightmarish journey through a West
Indian forest of Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter turned island
ruler. Fleeing his rebellious subjects, Jones confronts his violent
deeds and the tortured history of his race in a series of hallucinatory
episodes whose expressionist quality anticipates many of O'Neill's later
plays.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
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