Although O’Neill claimed he was a “tragic optimist,” Dowling’s sympathetic, comprehensive portrait reveals a man beset by...
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.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0300170337
Page Count: 584
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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