O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo

by Barbara Gelb, Arthur Gelb, Arthur

Book Overview

"Brilliantly researched and written...The story is as powerful as any O'Neill play...." -- Los Angeles Times Never before in the annals of American letters have biographers returned to their subject with the aim of radically rethinking and retelling their story form beginning to end. Arthur and Barbara Gelb's O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo is the first volume of the completely rewritten biography of America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright. The Gelbs originally published the first full-scale life of the dramatist in 1962, nine years after his death. In the intervening thirty-eight years, they have conducted extensive interviews and have unearthed masses of hitherto unknown or withheld material-letters, diaries, scenarios-from which they have fashioned this supremely definitive life of O'Neill. The Gelbs take O'Neill from his lonely childhood through his seafaring, adventure-filled and often self-destructive youth. This new research and perspective probes O'Neill's psychological torment over his mother's rejection and his father's benevolent tyranny, his suicide attempt, his struggle with alcoholism, and his tumultuous love affairs. This first volume follows O'Neill to his first triumph on Broadway with Beyond the Horizon that set him on the path toward the ultimate brilliant achievements of The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten , and what is universally regarded as America's greatest play, Long Day's Journey into Night . ?illustrated with black-and-white photo-inserts

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399146091
• ISBN13: 9780399146091
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Book Publishers
• Length: 722 Pages
• Weight: 3.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Incredible biography

This revised version of the Gelb's famous biography from the sixties is an incredible read. It traces the life of O'Neill from his early beginnings to his first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon. One gets an in-depth view of his life with his parents and brother. Monte Cristo provides the modern reader with an enriched biographical background that really elucidates aspects of O'Neill's masterwork, Long Day's Journey Into Night. This biography is clearly written, thoughtful, provocative, and interesting. It's definitely one of the great literary biographies of an American writer.