It's a long,foggy voyage taken in Edmond's deep ocean and its very sad. Through the blurry minds of the four members of the Tyrone's we travel back into their pasts and follow their tragic flaw. Especially Mary's choice has destroyed her whole life. Even though she loves James , its obvious that she has wasted her life by following his ambitions of becoming an actor and also has become a victim of his misery. James Tyrone is an old man now who unfortunately has not been able to get rid of his childhood's fears. The poverty that he suffered along with his three brothers has turned him into a vicious man.Who can blame him?He has suffered a lot when he was only 10 years old. How can we deny the fact that only the ones who experience real poverty, do know it closely and are afraid of it. He does not dare spend a bit more of his money for his own son's health. Money is more important than anything for him. Thus we see the couple lead their children into an unsober life .Its almost as if the father is like a Tyrant instead of a Tyrone. Thus, Jamie escapes them as a sailor and returns suffering of consumption without a penny in the till. The fog is even more depressing now. Edmond who critics believe to be Eugene O'Neill ,helps the narration by drinking with his father, where each one gives a long speech about their disillusions. They have no one else to blame but their past lives and what do we do with our wrong doings of past ? Don't we all have some long past wrong doings , haven't our parents taken the wrong choices sometimes? What are we supposed to do with them? Does the past hold in hand the right to ruin our present ? And if we allow it to happen , what will become of our future?

i don't think that the term 'enjoyable' can be attached to this poignant intensified private documentary of o'neill's life. what it is, is thought-provoking, humbling, heart-rending. one feels thoroughly uncomfortable, to say the least, reading the text; as if one were peeping through a spy-hole at a forbidden scene but with the master of the house standing behind one.

read it if you feel down in the dumps.

strangely, it promises a glimmer of hope in the enveloping 'fog' of despair.

From the opening curtain, O'Neill's play relentlessly examines the disintegration of the lives of four people. It is a disturbing drama where love and hate co-exist in such close proximity that it is sometimes difficult to separate one from the other.

The story unfolds in the course of a single day, which begins with an emergence from the fog, both literally and figuratively and ends with the descent of the fog yet again, deeper, more profound, more isolating than ever.

The youngest son, Edmund is the pivot point for the story. The other members of his family revolve around the drama of his failing health. He is represented by his family as both the cause and the victim of his mother's return to her addiction, his jealous brother's attempts to destroy his chances for success and his father's dissatisfaction with his life. And he accepts the responsibility thrust on him, all the while recognizing, acknowledging that it is merely an excuse for failures and bad choices.

The family, despite their best efforts, is bound together, caught in a web of their own creation, unable to escape eventual destruction. It is a sad commentary of life, poignant and fascinating. In spite of some dated references, it still provides an insightful look at the human condition.

While psychological drama does not often achieve its goal, O'Neill gets it right with "The Emperor Jones." Even when reading the play, one develops a sense of inexorable dread as the native drum speeds up and the Emperor runs into one hallucination after another. All in all, a decent play, though I cannot give it five stars, since I really do not buy into the whole "Emperor" idea. It is the one thing O'Neill does not pull off.

"The Emperor Jones," by Eugene O'Neill, is a striking work by one of America's most significant dramatists. A bibliographic note in the Dover edition states that the play was first performed in 1920 and published in 1921. It's a one-act play in 8 scenes.

The play tells the story of Rufus Jones, a former Pullman porter who has become the monarch of a West Indian island. But as the play opens there is trouble in his empire.

This is a surreal, nightmarish character study, full of violent and disturbing images. There is some biting dialogue, as well as an intriguing exploration of tension between Black Christianity and Black "heathen" religion.

Jones is a memorable figure, powerful and tragic. O'Neill's stage directions are full of fascinating visual and audio touches--his mastery of the genre is quite evident. Ultimately, "Jones" is a haunting meditation on power, belief in the supernatural, and the seemingly inescapable pull of history.

This edition provides three original plays by Eugene O'Neill, about men at war with themselves and society. In "The Emperor Jones" Brutus Jones is a black man who has escaped the law in the United States and found refuge on an island in the West Indies. Through deceit, Jones becomes emperor over the 'bush Negroes' he so despises. The play opens on an empty court with a cockney confronting the last of Jones' servants who is preparing to 'run away to the hills'. When Jones awakes and is

told of the situation by Smithers, he masks his cowardess with fake bravado and is soon overcome by his guilty conscience of taxing the people and of his former life. O'Neill delivers his vision of a destitute man and his guilty conscience masterfully, using the vibrant pulse of a tom-tom to keep the continuous beat that spells Jones' doom. In '"Anna Christie"', a Swedish Sailor and his daughter are reunited only to discover that everything can not be perfect after 15 years of separation. It is the story of Chris coming to terms with the knowledge that he could have provided a better life for his daughter, Anna. At the same time, Anna must realize that she can not live in a lie, but must tell her father and boyfriend the truth and ask for their forgiveness, while also learning how to love. As in O'Neill's other plays, the characters portrayed are at the bottom of the social ladder and must also come to terms with their station in life. Finally, O'Neill tells the story of a coal stoker on a steam-ship who is confronted with the realization that he is nothing but the dregs of society. With the innocence of a child, Yank personifies himself as steel, he is the power of the steamboat and nothing can stop him. Yank thinks only of himself and those around him, not daring to imagine a world outside that of his natural habitat, the furnace. In five minutes Yank's world comes crashing down as a woman from the outside looks in and is horrified by what she sees in the men. Through possible jealousy and despise, Yank attempts to avenge himself of the girl who condescended on him. When Yank is snubbed by a group he wants to join that could bring him his coveted revenge, he is cast further into gloom and self pity. With nowhere to turn, Yank breaks into a zoo where he confronts his fears by addressing what society claims is his equal. Eventually, Yank is brought to the cruel reality that he is nothing but a 'Hairy Ape'. O'Neill wrote the characters in The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, and The Hairy Ape as people at the bottom of the social ladder suffering from grief and guilty consciences because all people can identify with their trials and eventual reconciliations. Beautifully written and always stirring, these plays will never leave your mind or heart empty.

Just finished it! This is the best play I have ever read. In fact perhaps the best piece of writing ever read. An incredible journey through the past of a black man, Brutus jones aka Emperor jones, who over comes life to become an Emperor of an island in the West Indies. Only to find he has become something he hates, predominantly a white man stealing and corrupting his own brothers. He remembers his past violently attacking it, until he is killed by his own beliefs, when he told the natives he could only be kill by a silver bullet, the natives coerced him with haunting drum beats in the night while they made the silver bullet. forcing jones to go mad, and break down to defeat. He runs in acircle right into the native silver bullet!

It has been nearly fifty years since Eugene O'Neill's death. Much has been written about him since that time. In his new biography, Stephen Black insightfully analyzes the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning dramatist and his work. Black is an English professor with training as a psychoanalytic therapist. The "thesis" of his biography, Black writes, "is that O'Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning" (p. xvi). O'Neill, he contends, used playwriting as a means of self-therapy.

Black's 543-page biography is filled with interesting information about his subject's troubled life. We learn, for instance, O'Neill was born in a hotel room in 1888, and died in a hotel room in 1953. In between, he lived "a life of earthly and psychic wandering" (p. 43). At the time of his birth, O'Neill's mother became addicted to morphine, for which he blamed himself. As a mother, Ella O'Neill was "lonely" and "inadequate" (pp. 48, 51). O'Neill's father, an actor, was "revered," though "distant" (p. 47). O'Neill's estranged daughter, Oona, married Charlie Chaplin when she was 17. Chaplin was 54, and two month's younger than O'Neill. We learn that O'Neill's life was plagued with, among other things (and the list is long), illness, depression, alcoholism, family tension, unhappy marriages, and one devastating death after another. Truly, it is a wonder O'Neill ever found his way through the obstacles in his life to write four Pulitzer Prize winning plays, and to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936.

Black's book also contains plenty of perceptive commentary about O'Neill's plays. It ends with an impressive bibliography. Although I occasionally found O'Neill spending too much time on Black's couch in this psychoanalytical biography, this is nevertheless a worthwhile book for anyone interested in the playwright or his writing.

G. Merritt

Stephen A. Black has assembled an extraordinary range of materials to provide the first comprehensive psychoanalysis of O'Neill. Others have offered fragmentary perspectives, or analyses based on a little reading in psychoanalytic theory, but Black brings his experience as a trained analyst (as well as a literary scholar) to a through review of the historical documents. It must have been harrowing work for him, but we all stand to benefit from his having gone into the very mouth of a hellish psyche. (Hmmm... not so sure about that metaphor.) Anyway, it's a terrific book.

BEYOND THE HORIZON was Eugene O'Neill's first full-length play. The tale of two siblings who take off on very different and unexpected paths in life, the play explores how fate and our own decisions can doom our lives. Robert and Andrew Mayo have grown up on a farm somewhere in the United States. Robert is the dreamer and intellectual of the two, a lifetime of frailty preventing him from working as a farmer, and he dreams of seeing the world and living in places beyond the small confines of his family's farm. Andrew, however, is a man of purely practical concerns who is happily following in his father's footsteps and taking care of the farm. As the play opens, Robert has just been offered as change to go to see with his merchant seaman uncle, an opportunity that would fulfill his wanderlust. However, a woman creates a conflict between the brothers and Andrew takes the trip while Robert stays on the farm. From here, the play opens to show how one's best-laid plans can be dashed by the unexpected, as both brothers lead lives of despair.

While BEYOND THE HORIZON won O'Neill the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes, it doesn't survive the test of time very well. He insists on spelling out everything for the audience, resulting in some of the most ridiculous and just plain unrealistic dialogue I have ever seen. Readers who grew up in the tradition left by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter will also find O'Neill's lengthly set design annoying, as in some parts he spends up to two pages laying out each and every detail instead of leaving it up to the director as is done nowadays. Finally, BEYOND THE HORIZON is rather provincial and has none of the refinement that readers today will have become used to. American theatre at this time lacked any figure to make it matter on the world stage, and while O'Neill was to become this figure with his later plays, this work shows him still very immature.

I believe BEYOND THE HORIZON is a work worth reading only if one has a particular interest in the evolution of American theatre or the works of Eugene O'Neill in general. Its poor writing makes it quite unentertaining.

Beyond the Horizon was O'Neill's first major full-length play and its release is considered a significant turning point in the history of American theater. Its main characters are two twentysomething brothers, Rob and Andy, who have both spent their lives on the family farm and have quite opposite dispositions: Andy is excruciatingly practical and hopes for little more in life than to take over the farm and make it successful; whereas Rob is something of a bookish dreamer who hopes to see what life is like "beyond the horizon." He gets this opportunity when his uncle invites him to come along on a three year trip to South America and Asia, but the night before their departure, a woman with whom both Rob and Andy are in love professes her love for Rob, causing Rob to stay behind to marry her while Andy, unable to bear the idea of living alongside the new couple, takes Rob's place on the trip. The bulk of the play deals with the long-term consequences of this one night in which the brothers ignored their callings in life.

As is often the case in O'Neill's plays, the premise is fairly simple and unoriginal and the development of the plot is relatively predictable, but the intensity with which the characters are developed is excellent and truly memorable. We see in Rob the same sort of futile hope that O'Neill would develop so well some years later in The Iceman Cometh, and the despair of the other characters is quite moving. At times, the pathos in the play can almost be over-the-top (and I imagine that in live performances this might be something that the actors have to be all the more careful to avoid), but O'Neill manages to avoid going into the realm of melodrama and create very real, touching characters.

O'Neill would, of course, go on to write many other deeply emotional plays, a number of which are still better known than this one. Beyond the Horizon shows us many of the talents for which O'Neill is now universally recognized, and the almost-universal acclaim that it received upon its 1920 premiere seems equally apt today.

Beyond the Horizon is the story of 2 very close brothers, Robert and Andrew, who choose opposite paths in life. Each unfortunately, chooses a path better suited for the other. The deeper meaning in this play is what happens to a man's soul when he doesn't follow his dreams.

One of the comments on the back cover says it pretty aptly: "A compassionate, shattering character study, more short story than play." This is basically a 30-page monologue by one of the characters, with an occasional interjection by the other. It centers around the feelings of Erie (the main character) for the previous night clerk at the hotel where he lives (Hughie), who has died. I found it hard to really like Erie, and I was disappointed with the sudden transformation of the new Night Clerk at the end. However, it has to be said that this play would be great for choosing a monologue for acting class or an audition.

My class had to read Hughie as an assignment. I have read Beyond the Horizon and have fallen in love with the complete intimacy in which O'neill writes his plays. He used personal experience and showed us a new way to think. This is an incredible play to read and even better on stage.

Though, Louis Scheaffer's study of America's greatest playwright, Eugene O'Neill, is, at over 480 pages of actual text, over zealous in its details, it becomes engrossing by the last several chapters, drawing O'Neill's childhood into his writings. The companion to "O'Neill: Son and Artist," this book should be read by anyone with interest in the history of American Theater and Culture.

The ten plays in this collection (A Wife for a Life, Thirst, The Web, Warnings, Fog, Recklessness, Abortion, The Movie Man, Servitude, and The Sniper) were all written in the very earliest part of O'Neill's career, from 1913 to 1915, and were (and still are) all overshadowed by the numerous masterpieces O'Neill wrote beginning in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon. In the years before he began writing, O'Neill spent a great deal of time at sea, attempted suicide, and then came down with tuberculosis and spent six months at a sanatarium, where he discovered the works of Strindberg and others and decided to become a playwright. This is all reflected heavily in these plays: one of them deals with a consumptive character, three are set at sea, and a number of them end in suicides. Also, two of them deal with marital infidelity among the wealthy, a topic that I don't think O'Neill ever returns to in his later works but which was a favorite subject of O'Neill's idol Strindberg (in particular, Recklessness relates the affair between a married woman and her servant, which should sound familiar to readers of "Miss Julie.").

All of the plays except the three-act work Servitude are only one act and under thirty pages long. Presumably, O'Neill felt a lot more comfortable at this point in his career sticking to short treatments of matters that were close to him, and this appears to have been a good idea. Pretty much all of the plays in this collection show definite signs of the powerful tragedy for which O'Neill is known, and, considering how short they are, many of them are quite moving and haunting. While O'Neill had not yet reached his full maturity at this stage, he definitely was well-enough prepared to write very good one-act plays. His later, longer and more demanding works are very justifiably more famous than these ones, but if you enjoy O'Neill's better-known plays, his earliest works provide a very good view of the development of his style and talents, and you will probably enjoy them as well.

A Touch of the Poet is the only completed work in what Eugene O'Neill hoped to make into a nine-play cycle entitled "A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed." Set in 1828 near Boston, it centers around Con Melody, an Irish immigrant who takes pride in having served with distinction under Wellington in the war against Napoleon and who fancies himself as a distinguished gentleman despite all evidence to the contrary. He is married to Nora, who he in some ways detests due to her peasant birth (Melody was born into a wealthy family, though it acquired that wealth rather unethically), and his grown daughter Sara is in love with Simon Harford, the son of a legitimately wealthy Yankee. Despite being severely in debt, Con insists on maintaining airs of gentlemanliness--he keeps a horse solely for the purpose of showing off, and, on the day the play is set, he throws a lavish party in celebration of the anniversary of his moment of military glory--often at the expense of Nora and Sara. Despite Con's airs, Harford's snobbish father sees him for what he is and objects to Sara and Simon's impending marriage (an objection Simon would readily defy). This insult deeply offends Con, who storms off to Harford's house intending to challenge him to a duel instead of staying out of Sara and Simon's way as a caring father would.

All three of the main characters (Con, Nora, and Sara) are quite memorable--Con for his bizarre delusions of grandeur, his insistence of living in his romaticized glorious past, and his alternation of cruelty and contrition toward his family (to say nothing of what happens to him at the end of the play, which I won't reveal); Nora for her moving proud love for Con despite his reprehensible treatment of her; and Sara for her impressive stands against her father and her devotion to Simon. There were times, though, when the characters demonstrated such extreme behavior that I had a hard time suspending my disbelief, which is the only reason I'm not giving the play five stars. Con is very often contrite for his behavior toward his family, which appears to have been going on for decades, yet in all that time it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that maybe he ought to modify or at least try to suppress his hostility to Nora and Sara. Sara, meanwhile, issues all sorts of condemnations of how Con treats Nora, all of which he deserves, but one would think that after a certain amount of time she would realize that she's wasting her breath. However, even if their actions are a bit unbelievable at times, all three characters are developed quite movingly.

While all of the play was quite gripping, the last half of the final act was for me at least as cathartic as anything else in the dozen or so O'Neill plays I've read. A Touch of the Poet, having been written around the same time as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, tends to be overshadowed by those works, but it really is an excellent play that deserves vastly more attention than it gets.

I considered assigning this book in a high school Advanced Placement Literature class because the selection of plays is a perfect introduction to Greek drama, but I decided against inflicting it on students because most of the plays are translated into very awkward faux-Elizabethan English, making them nearly impenetrable for the uninitiated.

Is there no publisher out there who will create an affordable anthology of Greek plays in modern translations?

I work in a small public library which requires me to acquire materials which serve dual purposes. This title has 7 greek plays which give the reader an excellent selection of the best greek dramatists. However, the introduction provides the student with short biographies, overview of the nature of tragedy and comedy, and a history of the greek theater and the play performance. I use this book for those reports on the history of theater too. Good selection for small/medium libraries.