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By Louis Sheaffer. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968, 543 pp.
O'NEILL. SON AND ARTIST. By Louis Sheaffer. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973. 750 pp.
Louis Sheaffer's two-volume biography of Eugene O'Neill is a well documented, carefully organized, chronological detailing of the life and works of that tortured son and playwright-artist. In addition to chronologizing O'Neill's life, the author has attempted to explain in psychological terms the major inner conflicts that colored O'Neill's personal experience and propelled the thematic lines of his plays.
Sheaffer has accomplished his primary task with great skill. His seeking out of sources—people who knew O'Neill at any point during his life: classmates, shipmates, drinking mates, etc.—is a virtuoso performance. It is inevitable that the Sheaffer biography will be compared with the Gelb biography published in 1960.1 In many instances when the Gelbs had to rely only on rumor, myth, and educated speculation,