The only American dramatist awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Eugene O’Neill wrote with poetic expressiveness, emotional intensity, and immense dramatic power. This Library of America volume (the first in a three-volume set) contains 29 plays he wrote between 1913, when he began his career, and 1920, the year he first achieved Broadway success. Many of O’Neill’s early plays are one-act melodramas whose characters are caught in extreme situations. Thirst and Fog depict shipwreck survivors, The Web a young mother trapped in the New York underworld, and Abortion the aftermath of a college student’s affair with a stenographer. His first distinctive works are four one-act plays about the crew of the tramp steamer Glencairn that render sailors’ speech with masterful faithfulness. Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees portray these “children of the sea” as they watch over a dying man, sail though submarine-patrolled waters, take their shore leave in a London dive, and drink rum in a moonlit tropical anchorage. In Beyond the Horizon Robert Mayo begins a tragic chain of events by abandoning his dream of a life at sea, choosing instead to marry the woman his brother loves and remain on his family farm. The sea in “Anna Christie” is both “dat ole devil” to coal barge captain Chris Christopherson and a source of spiritual cleansing to his daughter Anna, an embittered prostitute. When a swaggering stoker falls in love with her, Anna becomes the apex of a three-sided struggle full of enraged pride, grim foreboding, and stubborn hope. Both of these plays won the Pulitzer Prize and helped establish O’Neill as a successful Broadway playwright. The Emperor Jones depicts the nightmarish journey through a West Indian forest of Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter turned island ruler. Fleeing his rebellious subjects, Jones confronts his violent deeds and the tortured history of his race in a series of hallucinatory episodes whose expressionist quality anticipates many of O’Neill’s later plays.

The Library of America’s collection of Eugene O’Neill’s plays “displays O’Neill more thoroughly than any playhouse ever could,” according to Time magazine. This volume, the second of three, contains 13 plays written between 1920 and 1931, years in which O’Neill achieved his greatest popularity while experimenting with a wide variety of subjects and styles. In Diff’rent, The First Man, and Welded, egotistical characters have their illusions about love shaken by the force of other people’s desires. All God’s Chillun Got Wings depicts the web of racial hatreds and spiritual longings that surround the marriage of a black man and a white woman. The Fountain tells of Ponce de Leon’s search for the fountain of youth. Marco Millions satirizes American materialism by portraying Marco Polo as a hustling businessman blind to the riches of Eastern culture. Lazarus Laughed shows its Biblical hero preaching love, laughter, and the defeat of death. The stoker Yank in The Hairy Ape, the architect Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, and the minister’s son Reuben Light in Dynamo all try to find a place for themselves in an increasingly soulless and mechanistic world. Yank believes that he “belongs” in his stokehold until a terrified heiress calls him a “filthy beast.” His rage turns to despair as he encounters a brutally indifferent society onshore. The Great God Brown uses masks to depict the divided souls of its hero, his wife, and his alter ego, the successful businessman William Brown. Betrayed by his mother, Reuben Light forsakes the God of his father for the new electrical god of the dynamo but finds no escape from the sexual conflicts that O’Neill characteristically intertwines with his hero’s religious doubts. Strange Interlude follows its heroine Nina Leeds through nine acts and 25 years of passionate and painful involvement with three men. Inspired by contemporary psychology, the novels of James Joyce, and the soliloquies of the Elizabethan theater, O’Neill uses spoken asides to reveal the shifting flow of his character’s inner thoughts. His most commercially successful play, it won him his third Pulitzer Prize. Ephraim Cabot, the patriarchal farmer in Desire Under the Elms, believes in a God as hard as the stony ground he works. He takes as his third wife sensual Abbie Putnam, who covets both his land and his resentful son Eben, unleashing passions that move with stark inexorability toward their fulfillment. In Mourning Becomes Electra, murderous lusts and hatreds wreak havoc upon the proud Mannon family, leaving the survivors pursued not by the avenging Furies of Greek myth but by their own scourging consciences. Searching desperately for peace, they repeatedly confront the temptation to choose oblivion that will haunt many of O’Neill’s last plays.

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 16-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 the truth about their lives. O’Neill carefully orchestrates the voices of over a dozen characters to form a chorus of overwhelming despair and surprising compassion. Hughie is a one-act dialogue between a reminiscing gambler and a weary hotel night clerk about the promise and loneliness of city life. Long Day’s Journey into Night unsparingly dissects the pain, rage, guilt, and love that drive a wounded family apart and bind it together. In their summer home the four Tyrones—James, a proud actor haunted by poverty, his devout, morphine-addicted wife, Mary, and their sons, Jamie, a cynical drunkard, and Edmund, an aspiring poet—slowly unveil the truth about their lives until they can no longer hope either to save or to escape one another. Published and produced posthumously, it won O’Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize. In its elegiac coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone seeks the peace that has long eluded him in the arms of sharp-tongued Josie Hogan. The volume concludes with “Tomorrow” (1917), O’Neill’s only published short story.