Masterpieces of American Drama: An Anthology and Introduction I-II. [antikvár]

EUGENE GLADSTONE O'NEILL: THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN DRAMA O'Neill's Life O'Neill was bora on October 16, 1888 in a hotel on Times Square in New York City. His family had a great influence on him. His well-known and successful actor-father, James O'Neill, who became a nation-wide celebrity through playing in The Count of Monté Cristo, his quiet, devout, convent-bred mother, Ella Quinlan O'Neill, his dissolute, destructive and self-destructive older brother, Jamie; and even the brother he never knew, Edmund; and all retura as characters in his plays. He spent his early life (1888-1895) with his parents on theatrical road tours all over the United States. From 1896 to 1900 O'Neill attended a Catholic priváté school, then was enrolled in a military institute (1990-1902). In 1902 he was sent to Betts Academy, a non-sectarian boarding school in Stamford, Connecticut where his years were happy and the academic program stímulating. O'Neill took a great interest in religion, mystery and the supernatural, as is evidenced by his plays, but he found the teaching of the Catholic Church "too confining" and found new ideas, new beliefs and new freedom by reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Zola and Maupassant He entered Princeton University in 1906 where he studied for ohly one year. (He was dismissed for throwing a beer bottle through the president's window.) Between 1907 and 1912 he did a variety of things, worked TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: ILLUSION, REALITY AND DESPERATE MORALITY IN THETHEATER Williams' Iife Tennessee Williams was bora Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. His father, Cornelius Williams, a descendant of frontiersmen and Indián íighters, a lieutenant is the Spanish-American War, a traveling shoe-salesman, was a violent and aggressive man with a strong masculine personality, who was never able to accept his son with his sensiüve nature. His mother, Edwina Dakin, the daughter of a clergyman was a gentle, vivacious, slrait-laced, and prím woman with a strain of Puritanism who was fond of her life on the beautíful plantations. A heritage of adventurers and violence fused with romanticism and southera gentility seemed to determine Williams' character, his world and the conflict of emoüons later expressed in his plays. The young Williams spent the first eight years under the influence of his mother who read to him constantly, and his beloved grandfather, an admirer of Edgár Allan Poe, who recited poetry to him. In 1918 his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri where his life was full of bitterness. He found it difíicult to adjust to living in small, shabby apartments, he hated the school he attended; his only companion was his sister Rose, and only in her presence, and the little world of unreality they built together, was life tolerable. Due to the unsettled