Conversations with Eugene O'Neill
This collection of thirty years of interviews with America’s only Nobel Prize dramatist records his encounters with the press and gives a striking portrait of the man and the process of his public mythologizing.
A profoundly private individual, O’Neill struggled throughout his life to overcome his intense discomfort with oral discourse as he responded to the probing of interviewers wishing him to discuss a wide range of social, political, literary, and theatrical issues.
Collected in their entirety for the first time, these interviews begin in 1920, when O’Neill was thirty-two. Serious American drama, for many, began and, for many others, ended with Eugene O’Neill. This collection lends new testimony to the truth of that assertion.
Mark W. Estrin, professor of English and film studies at Rhode Island College, is editor of Orson Welles: Interviews and Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman and author of numerous articles on film and dramatic literature.