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Eugene O'Neill was one of the first playwrights to be influenced by psychoanalysis. His work reflects the analytic ideas that permeated American intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. He sought psychoanalytic treatment for himself in the 1920s, as he established himself as a major playwright. In Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, Stephen A. Black documents all of this, as he demonstrates the autobiographical elements in much of O'Neill's dramatic work. Black recounts the familiar story of O'Neill's troubled background, his tortured life, his many loves and losses, and his magnificent art. This rendering is explicitly psychoanalytic, distinguishing it from other worthy biographies of O'Neill by Arthur and Barbara Gelb (1962) and Louis Sheaffer (1968, 1973). Black contributes valuable information, correcting and amplifying the data of his subject's life with his own meticulous research and that of other O'Neill scholars. The major strength of Black's portrait is his description of O'Neill's maturation as an artist. Less convincing is Black's attempt to demonstrate that writing plays constituted a personally invaluable self-analysis for O'Neill. The playwright himself seems to have believed this, yet Black states that O'Neill also remarked that writing “was his vacation from living or that living was something he endured in order to write”