Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy Book

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene Oâ??Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces Oâ??Neillâ??s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.Diggins paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwrightâ??s life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see Oâ??Neill as a young Greenwich Village radical, a ravenous autodidact who attempted to understand the disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that he knew was simmering beneath. According to Diggins, Oâ??Neill mined this disjunction like no other American writer. His characters burn with longing for an idealized future composed of equal parts material success and individual freedom, but repeatedly they fall back to earth, pulled by the tendrils of family and the insatiability of desire. Drawing on thinkers from Emerson to Nietzsche, Oâ??Neill viewed this endlessly frustrated desire as the problematic core of American democracy, simultaneously driving and undermining American ideals of progress, success, and individual freedom.Melding a penetrating assessment of Oâ??Neillâ??s works and thought with a sensitive re-creation of his life, Eugene Oâ??Neillâ??s America offers a striking new view of Americaâ??s greatest playwrightâ??and a new picture of American democracy itself.Read More

from£29.70 | RRP: £20.00
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £10.14
  • 0226148807
  • 9780226148809
  • JP Diggins
  • 8 May 2007
  • Chicago University Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 288
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.