Eugene O'Neill Remembered
Eugene O'Neill Remembered
Known principally as the author of some of the most significant plays in the American dramatic canon and as one of America’s Nobel Laureates in literature, O'Neill rarely gave interviews and offered few details about himself. As a consequence, his life has long been shrouded in myth. He also abetted some of the misconceptions about his youth by, for example, advocating the story that he was expelled from Princeton for throwing a rock through Woodrow Wilson's window or by exaggerating the amount of time he had spent at sea. The legend of the hard-drinking, tormented playwright with a grim view of life was further reinforced when Long Day's Journey into Night was produced in 1956, three years after his death instead of the twenty-five years he had insisted on.
The portrayal of O’Neill as a tragic figure has been solidified in a number of biographies. The purpose of this collection, however, is to present O'Neill as others saw him and described him in their first-person accounts. In the course of these reminiscences, many of the vast and various narrators conflict with and contradict each other. Unlike other accounts of O’Neill’s life, much of the focus is on impressions instead of facts. The result is a revealing composite portrait of a key figure in twentieth-century American literary history.
This extensive collection offers insights unavailable in any other book and will hold massive appeal for scholars and students interested in American literature, Eugene O’Neill, and theater history, as well as anyone keen to uncover intimate details of the life of one of America’s greatest writers.
Adding previously unpublished memoirs to available biographical material on the playwright, the volume corrects, perhaps inadvertently, some prevailing misconceptions about O’Neill. Biographies of O’Neill abound, to be sure. What distinguishes this volume is the gathering of disparate voices of O’Neill’s family members, friends, associates, and acquaintances, which vividly bring into relief the pitfalls of the single narrator’s voice, be it that of the biographer or the autobiographer. Recommended.’
—CHOICE
'Murphy and Monteiro have provided a timely addition to the emerging 'full' picture of Eugene O'Neill—the playwright, the artist, and the man'.
—Resources for American Literary Study, 2018
‘Eugene O'Neill Remembered is a cabinet of curiosity for diverse, fragmentary evocations left by a noisy writer and a difficult man who self-consciously made literary and theatrical history in the first part of the twentieth century.’
—William Davies King, author of Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O’Neill and Agnes Boulton
Monteiro and Murphy's exemplary compilation will be greeted with cheers from those of us interested in gaining new access to the playwright’s elusive personality and the nature of his closest associations.’
—Robert M. Dowling, author of Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
George Monteiro is professor emeritus of English and an adjunct professor emeritus of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown University. His books include Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed.
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction1
Part 1. New London, School, and Wandering (1888–1913)
1. George C. Tyler
2. Warren H. Hastings and Richard F. Weeks
3. Kathleen Jenkins Pitt-Smith
4. William Lee
5. Pierre Loving
6. Mabel Haynes
7. Clayton Hamilton
8. Irvin S. Cobb
9. Frederick P. Latimer
10. Arthur B. McGinley
11. Robert A. Woodworth
Part 2. Cambridge, Provincetown, and Greenwich Village (1914–1917)
12. Beatrice Ashe Maher
13. John V. A. Weaver
14. Susan Glaspell
15. Mary Heaton Vorse
16. Hutchins Hapgood
17. Harry Kemp
18. Adele Nathan
19. Dorothy Day
20. William Carlos Williams
Part 3. Provincetown Playhouse, Peaked Hill Bar, Ridgefield, Broadway (1918–1927)
21. Hazel Hawthorne Werner
22. Juliet Throckmorton
23. Manuel Zora
24. Edmund Wilson
25. Charles O'Brien Kennedy
26. Agnes Boulton
27. Jasper Deeter
28. Stark Young
29. Malcolm Cowley
30. Hart Crane
31. Harold De Polo
32. Brooks Atkinson
33. Calvin Hoffman
Part 4. Europe, Georgia, the Theatre Guild, California (1928–1937)
34. Louis Fladger
35. John Lardner
36. Bennett Cerf
37. Lawrence Langner
38. Brooks Atkinson
39. Rouben Mamoulian
40. Theresa Helburn
41. George Jean Nathan
42. Maxine Edie Benedict
Part 5. California and New York (1938–1948)
43. Carlotta Monterey O'Neill
44. Marcella Markham
45. Ingrid Bergman
46. Sean O'Casey
47. Karl Schriftgiesser
48. S. J. Woolf
49. Max Gordon
50. Herbert J. Stoeckel
51. Saxe Commins
52. Bennett Cerf
53. Paul Crabtree
54. Mary Welch
Part 6. Marblehead and Boston (1948–1953)
55. Saxe Commins
56. Carlotta Monterey O'Neill
57. Bennett Cerf
58. Earle F. Johnson
59. Dr. Frederic B. Mayo
60. Sallie Coughlin
61. Russel Crouse
62. Carl Van Vechten
List of Reminiscences
Additional Reminiscences
Biographical Sketches of Important Names
Permissions
Notes
Works Cited
Illustrations follow page 000.
Sinclair Lewis Remembered
Edited by Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer; Introduction by Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer
