O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo

by Arthur Gelb, Barbara Gelb

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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Theatre

784 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Arthur Gelb was an American editor, author, executive and a former managing editor of The New York Times. He enjoyed the plays of Eugene O'Neill so much that he wrote three biographies of the playwright with his wife Barbara Gelb.

Reviews

[Sharonlee]

I read this the summer of 1977, while my boss was on a 3-week vacation. Immersing myself in the life of my favorite playwright, I was in the middle of trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life, now that I had given up acting. It was a difficult time.

[Michael Paquette · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly reasearched and extraordinary account of the life of Eugene O'Neill that includes his father's early lives and their escape from the Irish famine and struggles and experienences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Cincinnati, and his apprenticeship as a machinist and later attempts as a farmer. His father would become one of the greatest actors in America and tour the country with the role of the Count of Monte Cristo for years. This book provides the background of what would become a volatile relationship with his parents and a worshipful relationship with his older brother by a young Eugene that leads to a gradual disillusionment. Through their reportorial style and their deeply researched subject the authors provide a guide to the societal and theatrical history of the United States from the mid 1800s to the 1920s. The book provides a look at the struggles of a young writer, his influential teachers, his angst and anxieties, his desire for adventures at sea, his spiritual despair and alcoholism, all of which he would overcome and become the greatest dramatist and playwright in American history. The book weaves the stories of his life into the characters in his works. It deftly describes the periods of his life that lead to his stories and his desire for a new and more realistic theater. His emotianal attachments to the thwarted relationships with Beatrice Ashe, Maibelle Scott and Louise Bryant are fully fleshed out through interviews, letters and correspondance. These early relationships as well as his marriage to Kathleen Jenkins which his father had him removed from after learning she was with child are thoroghly detailed and given the perspective of how they influenced his career. An extraordinary work and one of the finest biographies of any American artist.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fat biography of Eugene O'Neill is nothing if not thorough. Over 900 unpadded pages, Gelbs Barbara and Arthur give the skinny about a gargantuan figure in American playwrighting, onstage and off. And so we learn about the real-life counterparts to the tragic characters in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" as well as the writer's own rocky marriages to three very different women (one ignored; one abandoned; one revered and reviled). I especially enjoyed reading about his salad days with the Provincetown Players; about his overall distaste for Hollywood adaptations; and about his voluminous output. For the first half-decade of his career, he was averaging four one-acts and two full-lengths every year. This pace slowed only slightly during the subsequent 15 years and it was always bolstered by a firm belief in his own work matched only by an optimism that his best scripts always laid ahead. The final unhappy chapters in which his third marriage falls apart, his body hits the skids, and one child commits suicide, one becomes a drug addict, and one marries Charlie Chaplin are a strange example of life imitating art: serious sadness with some humor laced in.

[Cws]

812.52

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't wait for Arthur & Barbara Gelb to release second volume of O'Neill's extraordinary life. This work is a masterpiece!
Jim