Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888-1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian Anton Chekhov, Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish August Strindberg. This volume contains three early 20th century plays, Beyond the Horizon, The Straw, and the ten-page, one-act Before Breakfast.

Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of full-length plays, reworking themes from Greek tragedy, particularly The Oresteia of Aeschylus, relocated to New England in 1865, just after the end of the American Civil War. Lavinia Mannon (Electra) dotes on her father Ezra (Agamemnon), who has just returned victorious from the war, and despises her mother Christine (Clytemnestra) - especially since Catherine has been making a cuckold of Ezra with Lavinia's ex-suitor, Adam. Lavinia's brother Orin (Orestes), on the other hand, war-wounded and weak, idolises his mother and resents his overbearing father. When Christine and her lover poison Ezra, Lavinia convinces her brother that they must avenge their father's death. But they have spent years soaking in family conflicts and curses of generations past, and fate will be sated... Mourning Becomes Electra was premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre in October 1931. This edition of the play includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

A true modern classic from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers, Long Day's Journey into Night is an intensely autobiographical, magnificently tragic portrait of the author's own family - a play so acutely personal that he insisted it was not published until after his death. One single day in the Tyrones' Connecticut home. James Tyrone Snr is a miser, a talented actor who even squanders his talent in an undemanding role; eldest son Jamie is an affable, whoremongering alcoholic and confirmed ne'er-do well; youngest son Edmund is poetic, sensitive, suffering from a respiratory condition and deep-seated disillusionment; and their mother Mary, living in a haze of self-delusion and morphine addiction. Existing together under this roof, and the profound weight of the past, they subtly tear one another apart, shred by shred. 'Set in 1912, the year of O'Neill's own attempted suicide, it is an attempt to understand himself and those to whom he was irrevocably tied by fate and by love. It is the finest and most powerful play to have come out of America' Christopher Bigsby Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night was written in 1939-41, and first published in 1956 (after O'Neill's death in 1953). It was first performed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, in February 1956, and had its first American production at Helen Hayes Theater, New York, in November that year. It won the Tony Award for Best Play, and O'Neill was posthumously awarded the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This edition includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

An ominous play set in a cruel world of dark realism, an acknowledged masterpiece from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Harry Hope's Saloon is a waterfront bar full of life's failures. They exist barely, living on the knowledge that love is a chimera and despair is perpetual; that the desires they cultivate of an impossible future are only ever pipe dreams, because the only thing to look forward to is death. And then one day Hickey walks in with his own personal brand of hope, and his urge to make them face the truth. Written in 1939, Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh was first staged at the Martin Beck Theater, New York, in October 1946. It had its UK premiere at the Arts Theatre, London, in January 1958. 'A dramatised neurosis, with no holds barred, written in a vein of unsparing implacable honesty' Kenneth Tynan 'O'Neill, the great patriach of Broadway and the playwright who laid out the map on which all contemporary American drama is still written - Iceman is the first truly great epic of the modern American theatre, and its legacy is the intimate stripping of the soul which we now take for granted in drama worldwide' Sheridan Morley This edition of The Iceman Cometh includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

Two powerful expressionist plays from the early career of one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. The Hairy Ape is a nightmarish condemnation of the dehumanising effects of industrialisation on the American people. Robert 'Yank' Smith, an animalistic stoker, breaks free from his engine-room confines when he is spurned by the glamorous society woman, Mildred Douglas. Looking to find his free self out in the 'real' world, Yank goes on the rampage - but how much will his freedom cost him? And is there really any such thing? First staged at the Playwrights' Theater, New York, in March 1922. All God's Chillun Got Wings is a vigorous social commentary based around a violently dysfunctional mixed-race marriage. Ella is the neurotically jealous white wife of Jim, a driven, charismatic black man. She sabotages his career, effectively destroying him, before her frenzy lapses into remorseless dependency. First performed in 1924 at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York, in a production starring Paul Robeson. This edition includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

Two compelling and thought-provoking plays from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Anna Christie Eugene O'Neill's epic Pulitzer Prize-winning play about love and forgiveness charts one woman's longing to forget the dark secrets of her past and hope for salvation. Exiled from her home by the Old Devil Sea to the inland plains, Anna Christie's life changed for ever at just five years of age. Fifteen years later, she is reunited with the father who sent her away, and sets sail in search of a new beginning. Anna Christie was first staged at the Vanderbilt Theater, New York, in November 1921. Its first London production was at the Strand Theatre in April 1923. The Emperor Jones An expressionistic chronicle of a black dictator's flight from his oppressed subjects. Brutus Jones rules his island's citizens from his opulent palace with tyrannical ease - until the day that they all disappear. They have retreated to the hills, following their former native leader Lem, and plan to revolt. It is time for the Emperor to make good his escape. The Emperor Jones was first performed at the Playwrights' Theater, New York, in November 1920. Its UK premiere was at the Ambassadors' Theatre, London, in September 1925. This edition includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

Revived in 1998 to acclaim at New York's Lincoln Center, Ah, Wilderness! is a sharp departure from the gritty reality of the author's renowned dramas. Taking place over the July 4th weekend of 1906 in an idyllic Connecticut town, it offers a tender, retrospective portrait of small town family values, teenage growing pains, and young love.

Eugene O'Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed "The Iceman Cometh" in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, "The Iceman Cometh" has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. "The Iceman Cometh" focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

Long Day's Journey into Night was written in 1940 but not staged until 1956, after O'Neill's death. Unashamedly autobiographical, it is, as he puts it himself in the dedicatory note, 'a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood', a harrowing attempt to understand himself and his family.

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work. First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition, which includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom, coincides with a new production of the play starring Brian Dennehy, which opens in Chicago in January 2002 and in New York in April. "By common consent, Long Day's Journey into Night is Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece. . . . The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be forgotten by any of us."-Harold Bloom, from the foreword "Only an artist of O'Neill's extraordinary skill and perception can draw the curtain on the secrets of his own family to make you peer into your own. Long Day's Journey into Night is the most remarkable achievement of one of the world's greatest dramatists."-Jose Quintero "The play is an invaluable key to its author's creative evolution. It serves as the Rosetta Stone of O'Neill's life and art."-Barbara Gelb "The definitive edition of a `play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood,' as O'Neill described it in dedicating it to his wife, Carlotta."-Boston Globe

This tribute honors Robards in two parts. Part One presents recent interviews of the late actor as well as articles by Arthur and Barbara Gelb which appeared in the New York Times on the occasions of the American premier of Long Days Journey into Night (1956) and of the successful production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Colleen Dewhurst (1974). Part Two contains more personal recollections of Jason Robards. Several of Robards theatrical colleagues (Arvin Brown, Zoe Caldwell, Douglas Campbell, Blythe Danner, George Grizzard, the playwright A.R. Gurney, Shirley Knight, Paul Libin, Theodore Mann, Christopher Plummer, Kevin Spacey and Eli Wallach) recall their times with the actor.

An affectionate and witty comedy of recollection from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Eugene O'Neill's only well-known comedy, Ah! Wilderness is a family-based saga set in the years just before the First World War. Richard Miller is deeply enamoured with his 'best girl', the pretty and pure Muriel. But when her cantankerous father finds out about their plans to spend Independence Day together, he demands that she write to him breaking off the whole thing. Richard is distraught, heartbroken, and seems about ready to knuckle under to strong liquor and fast women... Can his father Nat reach across the generation gap and bring his son back to the family - and Muriel? Eugene O'Neill's play Ah! Wilderness was premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre in October 1933. It was first staged in the UK at Westminster Theatre, London, in 1936. This edition includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

The last work from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers, continuing the semi-autobiographical cycle centring on the Tyrone family started by Long Day's Journey into Night. James 'Jamie' Tyrone Jnr is a hard-drinking Broadway playboy, trying to blot out his painful memories of the past by indulging his craven self-destructive streak. One day he finds that he has wandered to the home of his salty tenant-farmer Phil Hogan; and Hogan's lusty, jaded daughter Josie. Under the Connecticut moon, Jamie and Josie find something in each other they never knew existed - though it is only when he passes out dead drunk that Josie can really touch him. But will he still be there when the moon goes? Eugene O'Neill's play A Moon for the Misbegotten had its world premiere at the Hartman Theatre in Columbus, Ohio, in 1947. It premiered on Broadway in 1957. This edition of the play includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

This volume brings to readers a selection of Eugene O'Neill's early work, written between 1914 and 1921 and produced for the stage between 1916 and 1922. Included here are: seven one-act plays, The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, Ile, Where the Cross Is Made, and The Rope; and five full-length plays, Beyond the Horizon, The Straw, Anna Christie, and the classics The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. The majority of the plays are heavily influenced by German expressionism-Freud, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and the radical leftist politics in which O'Neill was involved during his youth. Included in this unique collection is the little known and highly autobiographical play, The Straw, which draws on O'Neill's confinement in the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.