Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Celebrant of loss: Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953
- 2 O'Neill's philosophical and literary paragons
- 3 O'Neill and the theatre of his time
- 4 From trial to triumph: the early plays
- 5 The middle plays
- 6 The late plays
- 7 Notable American stage productions
- 8 O'Neill on screen
- 9 O'Neill's America: the strange interlude between the wars
- 10 O'Neill's African and Irish-Americans: stereotypes or “faithful realism”?
- 11 O'Neill's female characters
- 12 "A tale of possessors self-dispossessed"
- 13 Trying to write the family play: autobiography and the dramatic imagination
- 14 The stature of Long Day's Journey Into Night
- 15 O'Neill and the cult of sincerity
- 16 O'Neill criticism
- Select bibliography of full-length works
- Index
13 - Trying to write the family play: autobiography and the dramatic imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Celebrant of loss: Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953
- 2 O'Neill's philosophical and literary paragons
- 3 O'Neill and the theatre of his time
- 4 From trial to triumph: the early plays
- 5 The middle plays
- 6 The late plays
- 7 Notable American stage productions
- 8 O'Neill on screen
- 9 O'Neill's America: the strange interlude between the wars
- 10 O'Neill's African and Irish-Americans: stereotypes or “faithful realism”?
- 11 O'Neill's female characters
- 12 "A tale of possessors self-dispossessed"
- 13 Trying to write the family play: autobiography and the dramatic imagination
- 14 The stature of Long Day's Journey Into Night
- 15 O'Neill and the cult of sincerity
- 16 O'Neill criticism
- Select bibliography of full-length works
- Index
Summary
“The truth,” Eugene O'Neill wrote in 1926, in response to the first draft of Barrett Clark's biography of him:
the truth would make such a much more interesting - and incredible - legend. That is what makes me melancholy. But I see no hope for this except some day to shame the devil myself, if I ever can muster the requisite interest - and nerve - simultaneously.
And Clark later quoted Carlotta O'Neill's observation, made in 1933, that “he will never tell the truth about himself, because in so doing he would have to tell the truth about others close to him.” O'Neill did cooperate with Clark, though, and the biography, first published in 1926, includes an account of O'Neill's wanderings and his collapse with tuberculosis in 1912.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill , pp. 192 - 205Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998