Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Celebrant of loss: Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953
- 2 O'Neill's philosophical and literary paragons
- 3 O'Neill and the theatre of his time
- 4 From trial to triumph: the early plays
- 5 The middle plays
- 6 The late plays
- 7 Notable American stage productions
- 8 O'Neill on screen
- 9 O'Neill's America: the strange interlude between the wars
- 10 O'Neill's African and Irish-Americans: stereotypes or “faithful realism”?
- 11 O'Neill's female characters
- 12 "A tale of possessors self-dispossessed"
- 13 Trying to write the family play: autobiography and the dramatic imagination
- 14 The stature of Long Day's Journey Into Night
- 15 O'Neill and the cult of sincerity
- 16 O'Neill criticism
- Select bibliography of full-length works
- Index
8 - O'Neill on screen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Celebrant of loss: Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953
- 2 O'Neill's philosophical and literary paragons
- 3 O'Neill and the theatre of his time
- 4 From trial to triumph: the early plays
- 5 The middle plays
- 6 The late plays
- 7 Notable American stage productions
- 8 O'Neill on screen
- 9 O'Neill's America: the strange interlude between the wars
- 10 O'Neill's African and Irish-Americans: stereotypes or “faithful realism”?
- 11 O'Neill's female characters
- 12 "A tale of possessors self-dispossessed"
- 13 Trying to write the family play: autobiography and the dramatic imagination
- 14 The stature of Long Day's Journey Into Night
- 15 O'Neill and the cult of sincerity
- 16 O'Neill criticism
- Select bibliography of full-length works
- Index
Summary
Life then was simply a series of episodes flickering across my soul like the animated drawings one sees in the movies, and I could not then see how the continuity of my own seeking flight ran through them as a sustained pattern.
O'Neill on his days as a sailor (letter to Carlotta Monterey, 1917)If Eugene O'Neill here employs a cinematic image to recall his experiences as a young man at sea, directors and writers have sought for more than six decades - with varying degrees of success - to illuminate his drama in adaptations for the screen. Even when his reputation was at its lowest ebb in the decade between the premiere of The Iceman Cometh in 1946 and its triumphant 1956 revival, O'Neill's plays continued to appear with regularity in versions for film and television. The legacy of O'Neill on the screen has become essential to understanding the sustained patterns of his art and how it corresponds to more general patterns within American culture.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill , pp. 116 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998