Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT, by Louis Sheaffer. O'Neill did what only a major artist can do: make his public share his private demon. In this painstaking biography, the first of two volumes, Author Sheaffer traces the tensions that defined the playwright's life...
Goldman, who adapted the screenplay from his 1966 Broadway drama, can hardly be blamed for that, but he does not even seem to know who the real James Goldman is. Sometimes he seems to be a swaggering Elizabethan playwright whose rhetorical sword never gets out of its scabbard. "The sky is pocked with stars," sighs Henry. "Has my willow turned to poison oak?" he inquires of his mistress. At other times, Goldman is an anachronistic historian. "It's 1183, and we're all barbarians," announces the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn). Often Goldman is simply...
...NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT by Louis Sheaffer. 543 pages. Little, Brown...
...greatness lies in his will to be great. His passionate intentions, in fact, become his talent-a rude, almost barbaric thrust that can seize a blase Broadway crowd and wring it dry, half from fatigue, half from an emotional buffeting that no other American playwright ever inflicted on an audience. O'Neill could do what only a major artist can do: make his public share in the life of his private demons...
...first book of his two-volume biography. Sheaffer suggests that O'Neill might have been "perhaps no writer at all, had he had a more stable and reassuring childhood." Even less a stylist than his subject. Sheaffer, a former newspaper reporter, does little more than lean over the playwright's shoulder, tirelessly paraphrasing what O'Neill wrote in his most autobiographical play and his one masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night: "I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never...