Eugene O`Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy [Hardcover]

Stephen A. Black (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 1999

Within little more than three years of the opening of his first successful play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill endured the deaths of his father, mother, and brother. These devastating losses plunged the young playwright into a period of guilt and profound mourning that consumed two decades of his life. In this enlightening critical biography, deeply informed by the insights of psychoanalysis, Stephen Black presents a new understanding of Eugene O'Neill's life (1888-1953), from his troubled childhood and adolescence through a glacially slow period of mourning for his family to his ultimate emergence from the preoccupation with grief and loss that had pervaded his life and his writings. Black argues that O'Neill consciously and deliberately used playwriting as a medium of self-psychoanalysis—an endeavor that led to the creation of some of the finest American plays ever written and, eventually, to a successful therapeutic outcome.
Through close analysis of O'Neill's plays and literary writings, some five thousand surviving letters, other personal documents, and accounts of people who knew him, Black reaches new conclusions about important aspects of the playwright's life and work. He follows the slow course of O'Neill's mourning by studying the many grieving characters in O'Neill's plays, and when at last the playwright accepts his losses and moves on, his characters do likewise. The changed tone and form of O'Neill's final plays, including Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten, reflect the playwright's psychological and artistic growth and his hard-won victory over mourning and tragedy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Black, a professor of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and a psychoanalytic therapist, clearly states his central thesis in a prefatory chapter. "O'Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning," Black argues; his plays were the vehicles through which the playwright explored his tortured relationships with his father, mother and brother, and came to terms with their deaths, which all occurred in a devastating three-year period at the beginning of O'Neill's career. While this premise may sound simplistic, Black's examination of its manifestations in O'Neill's art is rich and complex. With his guidance, plays like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude reveal the dramatist's intense interest in (and use of) Freudian theories, making Black's psychoanalytically oriented approach appropriate. Yet the author does not insist on that approach as the only one; indeed, he makes a cogent case for the tragic worldview O'Neill (1888-1953) imbibed from Greek drama as a means by which the playwright developed a more objective view of his family and shed some of his guilt over the pain he inflicted on them. In his stimulating consideration of the late plays (Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten), which he believes contain strong comic elements usually ignored, Black paints a moving portrait of an artist who "had passed beyond mourning and tragedy." His thoughtful and provocative analysis does not supersede Louis Sheaffer's magnificent two-volume biography (O'Neill: Son and Playwright, 1968; O'Neill: Son and Artist, 1973), nor does it tell the whole story. Nonetheless, Black offers many fresh insights into the great American dramatist's life and work. 40 illus. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

One could ask, Do we need yet another biographical study of O'Neill? What can be left to say, especially given the exhaustive studies by Louis Sheaffer (O'Neill: Son and Artist and O'Neill: Son and Playwright, both AMS Press, 1988. reprints), among others? Black, a trained psychoanalytic therapist and English professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, demonstrates convincingly that there is indeed more to say. Using material from the Sheaffer-O'Neill Collection at the Shain Library at Connecticut Coll. as his springboard, Black offers a psychoanalytic framework to explore his thesis that much of O'Neill's work is the "work of mourning." He points to O'Neill's having had encounters with psychoanalysts in the 1920s and having considered his work a form of self-psychoanalysis. Closely analyzing some 5000 letters, the plays, other personal documents, and accounts by people who knew him, Black follows O'Neill's course of mourning. That O'Neill had a successful therapeutic outcome is shown in such plays as Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Highly recommended for all academic libraries and larger public libraries.ASusan L. Peters, Emory Univ. Lib., Atlanta
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 568 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (November 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300076762
• ISBN-13: 978-0300076769
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #998,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #57 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Theatre

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars O'Neill's long day's journey on Black's couch., August 3, 2000

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eugene O`Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (Hardcover)

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

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars outstanding psychoanalytic interpretation, June 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Eugene O`Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (Hardcover)

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.