"It was my work which first awakened the outside world to the fact that an adult American drama existed which could be considered as something beyond mere theatrical entertainment." Eugene O'Neill wrote this self-assessment in a 1944 letter, and the judgment, while hardly modest, still seems incontrovertible 35 years after his death and a century after his birth. As a young playwright, O'Neill inherited a theater tradition that was principally a frame for gaslighted frivolities. By the time he got through with it, the U.S. stage had become electric, and had learned to accommodate native-grown murder, madness, alcoholism, dark sexuality and the howling tensions of family life. Opening the curtain on such subjects might not have seemed the surest path to public success, yet O'Neill was one of the most admired and honored writers of his time. Four of his plays won Pulitzer Prizes, and in 1936 he became the first (and is still the only) American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
On the occasion of his 100th anniversary, O'Neill's revolutionary accomplishments are nowhere questioned, certainly not in the land of his birth. But the continued vibrancy of his plays -- their ability in performance to command the attendance and attention of a live audience -- has become a matter of some dispute. The centenary has, to be sure, sparked revivals of some of his works by theater groups across the country. But a mere handful of his 50 plays are now resurrected for the theater with any regularity. And of this small sample, which includes Ah, Wilderness! and The Iceman Cometh, only one seems surefire with playgoers and critics alike: A Long Day's Journey into Night, which was published after O'Neill's death and then performed first in 1956 despite his stated wish that it "never ((be)) produced as a play."
In truth, O'Neill's reputation has moved steadily away from the footlights toward reading lamps, a process that began during his lifetime. That, at least, is one of many conclusions to be drawn from Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill (Yale University; 602 pages; $35). Editors Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer have chosen 560 examples, some published for the first time, of the roughly 3,000 surviving O'Neill letters. The result is a fragmented but fascinating autobiography that shows its subject growing disillusioned with the theater even while he was furiously engaged in expanding its possibilities.