Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy (Large Print 16pt)

Description

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.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy

  • 2008-09-15
  • 288 pages
  • Ebook
  • University of Chicago Press
• 

  Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy

  • 2007-05-01
  • 321 pages
  • Paperback
  • University of Chicago Press

Similar books

• 

  Forthcoming Books

  By Rose Arny

  Forthcoming Books

• 

  Crossing Tecumseh Street

  By Earl S. Braggs

  Poetry. "Earl S. Braggs' CROSSING TECUMSEH STREET is lively, vocal, and laced with an intelligent sense of humor. I enjoyed these poems. I am going to share some of them...

• 

  Dickens Novels as Verse

  By Joseph P. Jordan

  It argues that some of the great Dickens novels are held together by book-length patterns in topics that, by organizing the object in dimensions extra to syntax, make readers’ experience feel truer than it would otherwise feel.

• 

  House on Fontanka

  By Earl S. Braggs

  Poetry. In 1992 Earl S. Braggs won the Anhinga Prize, selected by Marvin Bell, for HAT DANCER BLUE. In 1998, supported by a summer fellowship from the University of Tennessee,...

• 

  Hat Dancer Blue

  By Earl S. Braggs

  Hat Dancer Blue

• 

  In which Language Do I Keep Silent

  By Earl S. Braggs

  Poetry. "Earl S. Braggs' poems twist and wind through cities and streets, celebrating ordinary people and historical figures alike. He is generous enough to let them live in their own...

• 

  Hot Rock Licks

  By Franz Abt

  Includes: alternate picking, 3-octave scales, 4-note-per-string patterns, how to use arpeggios, and exciting two-handed licks. The tools you need to create your own hot solos. (60 min.)

• 

  Immigration Essays

  By Sybil Baker

  "From her childhoom home near Ferguson, Missouri, to her travels as an expatriate living in Asia, to the troubled cities of Eastern Europe, Baker explores the physical and emotional wanderings of what Mary McCarthy calls 'exiles, ...

• 

  The Blue Hotel

  By Stephen Crane

  "The Blue Hotel" is a short story by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). The story first appeared in the 1899 collection entitled The Monster and Other Stories.

• 

  Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples

  By Nena O'Neill, George O'Neill

  Advocates the importance of individuality in both partners in order to develop an open relationship in marriage