Eugene O'Neill's America
Desire Under Democracy
In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.
Diggins paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwright’s life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see O’Neill as a young Greenwich Village radical, a ravenous autodidact who attempted to understand the disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that he knew was simmering beneath. According to Diggins, O’Neill mined this disjunction like no other American writer. His characters burn with longing for an idealized future composed of equal parts material success and individual freedom, but repeatedly they fall back to earth, pulled by the tendrils of family and the insatiability of desire. Drawing on thinkers from Emerson to Nietzsche, O’Neill viewed this endlessly frustrated desire as the problematic core of American democracy, simultaneously driving and undermining American ideals of progress, success, and individual freedom.
Melding a penetrating assessment of O’Neill’s works and thought with a sensitive re-creation of his life, Eugene O’Neill’s America offers a striking new view of America’s greatest playwright—and a new picture of American democracy itself.
“John Patrick Diggins has made an extensive examination of O’Neill’s representations in his plots and characters of historical and political opinions, prejudices and insights and found them to be often pessimistic and self-contradictory. Yet in the end, O’Neill ‘sought to convey the quality of understanding that is born only of pain and rises to perception to reach the truths of human passion. For life to be felt as noble, it must be seen as tragic.’ This will be an essential book for all who seek to know the political dimensions of O’Neill’s work and view of the world.”—Stephen A. Black, author of Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy
“Sixty years ago Eric Bentley wrote a seminal book on ‘the playwright as thinker.’ John Patrick Diggins discusses Eugene O’Neill in precisely this light—as a dramatist who reflected deeply on American history in terms of the most serious ethical and political concerns. O’Neill is usually seen today as a haunted figure best remembered for his late, great autobiographical plays, but Diggins reminds us of other profound dimensions of his work, his lifelong obsession with national as well as personal origins.”—Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden and A Mirror in the Roadway
“A compelling intellectual and cultural history of Eugene O’Neill’s role in and contribution to American culture. Eugene O’Neill’s America is interdisciplinary in the finest sense, combining biography, cultural studies, politics, and theatre history. Diggins’s study represents not only a sophisticated treatment of O’Neill’s dramatic works, but also makes a persuasive case that O’Neill should be regarded as America’s greatest playwright.”<John Rodden, author of The Politics of Literary Reputation>
“This critical biography of Eugene O’Neill by John Patrick Diggins seems to me one of the best and most useful studies available to us of our nation’s major dramatist. Diggins emphasizes what matters most about O’Neill’s crucial plays: their insight into our national inability to confront our own communal illness, which is self-deceit as to a supposedly democratic identity. The madness of our national politics and our international exploits could hardly be better exposed than by Diggins on O’Neill. Diggins also gives the best account I have seen of O’Neill’s relationship to Nietzsche, his prime precursor.”—Harold Bloom
“Biographers have published dozens of books on Eugene O’Neill over the last 50 years in an attempt to explain the complexities of America's 20th-century ‘master playwright.’ What makes Diggins’s thoroughly researched effort particularly effective is his use of political, philosophical, social, psychological, and religious themes in his discussion of O’Neill’s life and plays within the context of a dynamic American society. Diggins begins with a narrative describing O’Neill’s troubled early personal life and follows with thematic chapters discussing the major influences on the playwright’s writing, from contemporary philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche to the ancient Greek tragedians. Diggins generously illustrates each theme with multiple examples from O’Neill’s plays and correspondences. Particularly insightful are his comparisons of O’'Neill’s work with that of other great writers on the theme of American democracy, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln. This book offers the reader a lot to think about, regarding not only O’'Neill’s life and work but also American society at large.”—Library Journal
Introduction: Knowers Unknown to Ourselves
1. The Misery of the Misbegotten
2. The Playwright as Thinker
3. Anarchism: The Politics of the "Long Lonliness"
4. Beginnings of American History
5. "Lust for Possession"
6. Possessed and Self-dispossessed
7. "Is You a Nigger, Nigger?"
8. "The Merest Sham": Women and Marriage
9. Religion and the Death of Death
10. "The Greek Dream in Tragedy Is the Noblest Ever"
11. Waiting for Hickey
Conclusion: The Theater as Temple
Notes
Index
History: American History | History of Ideas
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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