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Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920

Beyond the Horizon | “Anna Christie” | The Emperor Jones | The Glencairn cycle (4 one-act plays) | 22 other plays More

Edited by Travis Bogard

“These handsome books present Eugene O’Neill’s plays in the order for their composition, making it possible to trace the evolution of his skills and ideas…. The Library of America volumes display O’Neill more thoroughly than any playhouse ever could.” — Time

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

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 29 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.

Travis Bogard (1918–1997), volume editor, was emeritus professor of dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, author of Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, editor of The Unknown O’Neill, and co-editor of Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920 is kept in print by a gift from the Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

A Wife for a Life
The Web
Thirst
Recklessness
Warnings
Fog
Bread and Butter
Bound East for Cardiff
Abortion
The Movie Man
Servitude
The Sniper
The Personal Equation
Before Breakfast
Now I Ask You
In the Zone
Ile
The Long Voyage Home
The Moon of the Caribbees
The Rope
Beyond the Horizon
Shell Shock
The Dreamy Kid
Where the Cross Is Made
The Straw
Chris Christophersen
Gold
“Anna Christie”
The Emperor Jones

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ISBN: 978-0-94045048-6 1104 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 40 Library of America Series

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