Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

by Travis Bogard

Overview

Eugene O'Neill, one of America's most gifted and prolific playwrights, wrote more than 60 plays between 1914 and 1941, a level of creativity paralleled in modern times only by Bernard Shaw. The progress of his art from crude, one-act plays to the monumental tragedies of his later years is a story as dramatic and compelling as that of his tortured personal history. Combining the two, Professor Bogard traces the contours of O'Neill's life in his art. By discussing, in their approximate order of composition, the published and unpublished works, Bogard illuminates not only the plays, but also the literary, aesthetic, and historical influences on the playwright's development. For the revised edition of this insightful, meticulously written work, the author has added new and unpublished material on A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed, a cycle of nine plays written by O'Neill during the 1930s and '40s, only one of which he readied for the stage. Among the plays in this cycle that have been posthumously produced are More Stately Mansions (New York, 1967) and A Touch of the Poet (New York, 1958).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195053418
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/07/1988
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	9.34(w) x 6.28(h) x 1.52(d)

About the Author

Travis Bogard, Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Berkeley, has co-edited several volumes of Eugene O'Neill's letters and is editing the forthcoming Complete Works of Eugene O'Neill. He was awarded a Gold Medal from The Theater Committee on Eugene O'Neill in 1984.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xi
I	The Tyro (1913-1914)	3
	A Wife for a Life
	The Web
	Recklessness
	Abortion
	Warnings
	The Movie Man
	Fog
	Thirst
	Bread and Butter
	Servitude
	Bound East for Cardiff
II	The Student (1914-1916)	45
	The Dear Doctor
	A Knock at the Door
	Belshazzar
	The Sniper
	The Personal Equation
	Atrocity
	The G. A. M.
	Now I Ask You
III	The Amateur (1916-1917)	63
	Before Breakfast
	In the Zone
	The Long Voyage Home
	The Moon of the Caribbees
	Ile
	Tomorrow
	The Reckoning
IV	Pause (1918-1919)	95
	S.O.S.
	Shell-Shock
	Where the Cross Is Made
	The Rope
	The Dreamy Kid
	Exorcism
	The Straw
	Chris Christopherson
	Beyond the Horizon
	Till We Meet
	Honor Among the Bradleys
	The Trumpet
V	Amateur's End (1920)	131
	The Emperor Jones
	Gold
	Diff'rent
	The First Man
	The Ole Davil
	"Anna Christie"
VI	The Triumvirate, 1 (1922-1924)	167
	Welded
	All God's Chillun Got Wings
	Desire Under the Elms
VII	The Triumvirate, 2 (1921-1926)	227
	The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
	The Revelations of John the Divine
	The Fountain
	The Hairy Ape
	Marco Millions
	The Great God Brown
	Lazarus Laughed
VIII	The End of Experiment (1924-1932)	291
	Strange Interlude
	Dynamo
	Days Without End
IX	The Historian (1929-1933)	331
	Mourning Becomes Electra
	Ah
	Wilderness!
X	The Door and the Mirror (1933-1941)	363
	A Tale of Possessors
	Self-dispossessed
	A Touch of the Poet
	More Stately Mansions
	The Iceman Cometh
	Hughie
	Long Day's Journey into Night
	A Moon for the Misbegotten
	Bibliographical Note	459
	A Note on the Revised Edition	461
	Notes	463
Appendix I.	The Staging of the Tao House Plays	471
Appendix II.	Casts of O'Neill's plays	479
	Index	501

Editorial Reviews

"A classic.... [The final chapter], a masterpiece of compression...draws together innumerable facets of the dramatist's life and work and shows how [A Long Day's Journey into Night] achieves an illumination through pain that may have been O'Neill's salvation."—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher