Six Short Plays of Eugene O'Neill:
The Dreamy Kid, Before Breakfast, Gold/Diff'rent, The Straw, and Welded
"I love life. But I don't love life because it is pretty. Prettiness is only clothes-deep. I am a truer lover than that. I love it naked. There is beauty to me even in its ugliness. In fact, I deny the ugliness entirely, for its vices are often nobler than its virtues, and nearly always closer to a revelation....
"To me, the tragic alone has that significant beauty which is truth. It is the meaning of life -- and the hope. The noblest is eternally the most tragic. The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been!" -Eugene O'Neill, from the biography by Barbara and Arthur Gelb
About the Author
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is one of the most significant forces in the history of American theater. With no uniquely American tradition to guide him, O'Neill introduced various dramatic techniques, which subsequently became staples of the U.S. theater. By 1914 he had written twelve one-act and two long plays. Of this early work, only Thirst and Other One-act plays (1914) was originally published. From this point on, O'Neill's work falls roughly into three phases: the early plays, written from 1914 to 1921 (The Long Voyage Home, The Moon of the Caribbees, Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie); a variety of full-length plays for Broadway (Desire Under the Elms; Great God Brown; Ah, Wilderness!); and the last, great plays, written between 1938 and his death (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten). Eugene O'Neill is a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936.
!["The three plays in this volume all deal with the misery of man, but we note at once that the misery is not immediate and physical, not social, but ultimate and, as it were, metaphysical. In each play the central character is one of the insulted and injured: one an [African American], another a stoker, the third a postitute. But whereas for most of us the plight of such people immediately evokes the social forces that have insulted and injured them, for O'Neill the social insult and injury are not so much facts in themselves as symbols of man's cosmic situation. Thus the "emperor," Brutus Jones, does not typify the [African American]. He typfies all men with their raw ignorance and hysterial fear under the layers of intellect. The Hairy Ape is not a play about the proletariat. Yank Smith is the embodiment of our modern pride of power. Anna Christie is no less symbolic of the darkness of man's ultimate fate." --Lionel Trilling](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/1368/2139/EugeneOneil__62991.1666558303.jpg?c=2 "\"The three plays in this volume all deal with the misery of man, but we note at once that the misery is not immediate and physical, not social, but ultimate and, as it were, metaphysical. In each play the central character is one of the insulted and injured: one an [African American], another a stoker, the third a postitute. But whereas for most of us the plight of such people immediately evokes the social forces that have insulted and injured them, for O'Neill the social insult and injury are not so much facts in themselves as symbols of man's cosmic situation. Thus the \"emperor,\" Brutus Jones, does not typify the [African American]. He typfies all men with their raw ignorance and hysterial fear under the layers of intellect. The Hairy Ape is not a play about the proletariat. Yank Smith is the embodiment of our modern pride of power. Anna Christie is no less symbolic of the darkness of man's ultimate fate.\" --Lionel Trilling")
