Eugene O'Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.



About the Author
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), the father of American drama, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, is the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.



Reviews
Selected as a 2007 AAUP University Press Book for Public and Secondary School Libraries

"We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality . . . life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion."-from the foreword by Harold Bloom

Book Information
ISBN 9780300117431
Author Eugene O'Neill
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Yale University Press
Publisher Yale University Press
Weight(grams) 227g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 127mm * 16mm