Eugene O'Neill

The only American dramatist awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Eugene O'Neill wrote with poetic expressiveness, emotional intensity, and immense dramatic power. On the centenary of his birth The Library of America is publishing the first complete collection of O'Neill's plays. This volume, the second of three, contains 13 plays written between 1920 and 1931, years in which O'Neill achieved his greatest popularity while experimenting with a wide variety of subjects and styles. In Diff'rent, The First Man, and Welded, egotistical characters have their illusions about love shaken by the force of other people's desires. All God's Chillun Got Wings depicts the web of racial hatreds and spiritual longings that surround the marriage of a black man and a white woman.