Eugene O'Neill

Starred review from September 29, 2014
A self-described “tragic optimist,” O’Neill, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for drama and the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize, is thoroughly anatomized in this absorbing biography. Dowling, an English professor and board member of the Eugene O’Neill Society, begins with O’Neill’s upbringing amid theatrical royalty—his father, James, was regarded as one of his generation’s greatest actors—and subsequent rebellion against the era’s theatrical conventions. Falling in with the Provincetown Players in 1916, he wrote a series of frank, unsettling plays first staged between 1920 and 1924—The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie, among them—that revolutionized American theater even while angering the guardians of public morality. Dowling provides insightful interpretations of O’Neill’s lesser-known plays that give context for the masterpieces, and draws extensively from letters, diaries, and memoirs that tell this story in O’Neill’s own words and those of his associates. The book unflinchingly explores the darkness that dominated O’Neill’s life—O’Neill and his brother, Jim, were chronic alcoholics, his mother Ella was a morphine addict, and Eugene was a negligent husband and father—and emerged in his most autobiographical works, including The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. As portrayed by Dowling, O’Neill was an artist dedicated to channeling his hatreds and the demons that dogged him into works of creative genius. 49 b&w illus. Agent: Geri Thoma, Elaine Markson Literary Agency.

October 6, 2014
Yale's annual Terry Lectures have yielded another elegant book that addresses contemporary concerns. Kitcher's well-organized presentation ranges widely in drawing together sources from literature, philosophy, and the sciences to respectfully make a persuasive case that a secular outlook on life can produce value, meaning, and solace, all functions that religion has traditionally filled. He reasons sans broadsides, finding that religion is not so much violent or evilâas many of today's atheists argueâas it is improbable and, more important, unnecessary. He is a kind critic of religion, conceding that "refined religion," the highest form of belief and practice, has at least the advantage of being better organized to act for human improvement, since there are as yet no numerous or vast bodies of secular humanists doing disaster relief. (Give it time, he suggests.) Kitcher's real strength is his sensitivity to human suffering and mortality, and the ways in which those concerns must be addressed by a robust secular ethic.

November 1, 2014

The subtitle of this collection of Kitcher's (John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia Univ.; Preludes to Pragmatism) Terry Lectures forms the aim of this project, an articulation and defense of a secular humanism that is broader than militant atheism. One can divide Kitcher's strategy into two parts. First he separates religion into two types--unrefined and refined. The former involves a literal adherence to the tenets of a religion (which he quickly dispatches as fiction), while the latter relies on symbol and metaphor to point to an otherwise ineffable transcendent. This procedure has the curious effect of placing such sophisticated theists as Marilyn McCord Adams and Peter van Inwagen in the unrefined camp, but Kitcher's focus is on refined religion. Here again the case is two-fold: one argues for the ineffectualness of the transcendent in establishing reasonable judgments, and the other is a series of statements that secular humanism can provide a basis for those things that religion (broadly conceived) has long been seen as a bulwark--ethics, values, and meaning. While tightly reasoned, this set of lectures is also lively and engaging. VERDICT This title makes for a fine touchstone for those interested in the discussion of the function of religion in a secular society.--James Wetherbee, Wingate Univ. Libs., NC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2014
A portrait of a playwright inspired by suffering. When Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began writing plays in 1913, American theater featured hackneyed melodramas with audience-pleasing happy endings. O'Neill's dark themes-oppression, racism, alienation-and innovative staging revolutionized the genre, paving the way for such later iconoclasts as Tennessee Williams and Thornton Wilder. In this authoritative biography, Dowling (English/Central Connecticut State Univ.; co-author, Critical Companion to Eugene O'Neill, 2009, etc.) traces the trajectory of O'Neill's career: his two semesters in George Baker's noted playwriting seminar at Harvard; his professional growth with the Provincetown Players; the production of his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon (1920), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and his prolific output for the next two decades, including the Pulitzer-winning Anna Christie (1920) and Strange Interlude (1927) and ending with A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943) and the posthumous production of Long Day's Journey into Night (1956). Critical acclaim did not assuage the demons that haunted O'Neill from childhood, however. Desperately lonely, "besieged by hideous attacks of rage, guilt, and fear," he drank. "The stranglehold alcoholism had taken over O'Neill by the early twenties is nearly impossible to overstate," Dowling writes. He felt spiritually and emotionally bereft. He was married three times, the last to the domineering Carlotta Monterey, who vowed to "construct a fortress around her husband" to protect him from annoyances, including his children from previous marriages. Both sons committed suicide. His daughter, Oona, who eloped with Charlie Chaplin when she was 18, also succumbed to alcoholism. O'Neill was stridently critical of America, calling it "the greatest failure....Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside of it...." Although O'Neill claimed he was a "tragic optimist," Dowling's sympathetic, comprehensive portrait reveals a man beset by self-hatred and despair, struggling-and failing-to find salvation.

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November 1, 2014
That America's greatest playwright was one messed-up man may not be news, but Dowling's clear-eyed, just-the-facts biography makes it dismayingly fresh. Just when one thinks that O'Neill can't do anything worse than his last knock-down, drag-out with the wife at hand, he tops himself. Indeed, he reserved his most histrionic marital donnybrooks for his last and mostuh, uh, uhaccommodating marriage. Meanwhile, he was involved with the most dazzling set of creative philosophical anarchists ever, in Greenwich Village in the twentieth century's second and third decades, and sculpting serious, naturalist-cum-expressionist American theater during the entire interwar period, binge drinking all the while. Fortunately, until a neurological disorder disabled him, he was binge writing, soberly, too. Dowling brings all this herculean activity vividly to life, adding a handful of newly discovered information and photos to the spectacle of existential angst O'Neill played out. He doesn't venture any appraisal of O'Neill's work, reputation, and heritage, however, which will disappoint anyone expecting a critical biography. But for the kaleidoscopic horror show that was O'Neill's life, this is the book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)