Audiobook: Eugene O'neill's America: Desire Under Democracy

• Report rights infringement
• published: 25 Oct 2016
• views: 0

Get your free audiobook or ebook: http://skyble.space/sabk/35/en/B001PGXEM4/book In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene Oneill'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 Oneills tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.diggins paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwrights life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see Oneill 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, Oneill 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, Oneill 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 Oneills works and thought with a sensitive re-creation of his life, Eugene Oneills America offers a striking new view of Americas greatest playwrightand a new picture of American democracy itself.