Eugene O'Neill: Complete Plays Vol. 3 1932-1943 (LOA #42) [Hardcover]

The third and final volume of the first complete collection of Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic writings (available exclusively from The Library of America) contains eight plays written between 1932 and 1943, when illness forced him to stop writing. They represent the crowning achievements of his career.

O’Neill described Ah, Wilderness! as “the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been.” Set in the summer of 1906, it affectionately depicts the warm, close family of sixteen-year-old Richard Miller and the innocence with which he faces the trials of first love, strong drink, and sexual temptation.

John Loving, hero of Days Without End, is split by his lack of faith into two selves: John and his Mephistophelian double Loving, who wears John’s death mask and plots his destruction. Burdened by guilt but desperately wanting to love, John struggles with Loving’s nihilistic hatred in what O’Neill termed his “modern miracle play.”

In A Touch of the Poet, Irish tavern-keeper Con Melody is drawn by his proud past as a Byronic cavalry hero of the Napoleonic Wars toward a fatal confrontation with his wealthy Yankee neighbors, the Harfords.

Throughout More Stately Mansions, the idealistic yet cunning Simon Harford, his wife, Sara Melody Harford, and his mother, Deborah, continually shift roles and alliances as they engage in an eerie psychological and sexual battle for possession of each other and their own maddeningly elusive dreams. This volume presents the never-before-published complete text of the revised typescript for this unfinished play.

The derelict inhabitants of Harry Hope’s saloon in The Iceman Cometh find solace in their comradeship until their drifting calm is destroyed by the visiting salesman Theodore Hickey, who insists that they abandon all “pipe dreams” and face thlc›