The bridge between the pre-war and post-war world in the American theatre is provided by a single man, albeit a man who, by 1945, had been silent for more than a decade. If any one writer can lay claim to having invented that theatre it was he. From a disregarded and parochial entertainment he had raised it to a central cultural activity, making it thereby a focus of world attention. His name was Eugene O'Neill and throughout his career and subsequently he has created a sense of unease in literary and dramatic circles. There is something altogether too uncontrolled, too eclectic, too unformed about his talent to inspire respect. He paints with a broad brush. His characters are pressed to social and psychological extremes by experience. He shared with his father, whose own theatre he so despised, a taste for the melodramatic and overstated. His characters lurch between self-conscious lyricism and aphasia. He is, in short, something of an embarrassment. And yet there is no way around him. For thirty years his work constituted America's claim to have created a powerful modern dramatic literature. However, by 1936, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, his reputation was already in decline and hardly recovered in the immediate post-war years. For twelve years, between 1934 and 1946, no new O'Neill play was produced; and after a poor production of The Iceman Cometh, in 1946, no further play was produced before his death in 1953 – A Moon for the Misbegotten dying on the road. Critics know they cannot do without O'Neill; their problem is to know what to do with him.