Eugene ONeill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completedThe Iceman Comethin 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to ONeills darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since,The Iceman Comethhas gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. The Iceman Comethfocuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.
Selected as a 2007 AAUP University Press Book for Public and Secondary School Libraries
"We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength ofIcemanis its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality . . . life, inIceman,is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion."—from the foreword by Harold Bloom
Eugene ONeill(1888-1953), the father of American drama, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, is the author of many books, includingThe Western Canon,Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, andJesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.