Three Plays: Desire Under the Elms / The Hairy Ape / Welded

by Eugene O'Neill

1925. Eugene O'Neill, Nobel laureate and four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is considered one of the most significant forces in the history of the American theater. These three plays exemplify Eugene O'Neil's ability to explore the limits of the human predicament, even as he sounds the depths of his audiences' Desire Under the Elms is set on a Connecticut farm in the middle of the 19th Century and features the Cabot family; The Hairy Ape, is O'Neill's expressionistic study of a brutish stoker's search for the meaning of his existence; and Welded spotlights the rigid bonds linking a moody playwright and a mercurial actress. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956.

He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches.

His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! , his only comedy: all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.