Margins
All God's Chillun Got Wings book cover
All God's Chillun Got Wings
1924
First Published
3.42
Average Rating
64
Number of Pages
All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) is an expressionist play by Eugene O'Neill about miscegenation inspired by the old Negro spiritual.[1] He began developing ideas for the play in 1922, emphasizing its authenticity in his notes: "Base play on his experience as I have seen it intimately."[2] O'Neill wrote the play in the fall of 1923 and revised the text only slightly for its 1924 publication.[3] Arguably one of his most controversial of plays, it starred Paul Robeson in the premiere,[4] in which he portrayed the black husband of an abusive white woman, who, resenting her husband's skin color, destroys his promising career as a lawyer
Avg Rating
3.42
Number of Ratings
126
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
40%
2 STARS
11%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads

Author

Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Author · 56 books

American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956. He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches. His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! , his only comedy: all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved