Conversations with Eugene O'Neill

Book excerpt: This collection of thirty years of interviews with America's only Nobel Prize dramatist records his encounters with the press and gives a striking portrait of the man and the process of his public mythologizing. A profoundly private individual, O'Neill struggled throughout his life to overcome his intense discomfort with oral discourse as he responded to the probings of interviewers wishing him to discuss a wide range of social, political, literary, and theatrical issues. Collected in their entirety for the first time, these interviews begin in 1920, when O'Neill was thirty-two. Serious American drama, for many, began and, for many others, ended with Eugene O'Neill. This collection lends new testimony to the truth of that assertion.