A Moon for the Misbegotten - A Play in Four Acts

New York: Random House, 1952. First Edition of Eugene O’Neill’s Rarest Book to Obtain Signed. Signed and inscribed by the author, Eugene O’Neill, with a superb inscription to his step-daughter, Cynthia Chapman Stram, who typed the manuscript for this play: “For Cyn, whom I regard as a collaborator in this opus – which I wish were better! – (think of those days of typing!) – with as always, love and understanding: Your admiring Step-Pop, Gene, August 1952.” Hardbound in original cloth. Very good plus in a fine bright dust jacket. The last play Eugene O’Neill wrote and also the last play published in his lifetime. In the 1940s, O’Neill was afflicted with a neurological disease that caused his hands to violently shake. He found that he was unable to write unless he could physically put pen to paper, and O’Neill’s career ended. Fortunately, he had completed in manuscript what are now considered his four greatest plays, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh, A Touch of the Poet, and A Moon For the Misbegotten. When The Iceman Cometh was produced on Broadway and published in 1946, O’Neill was determined to inscribe a small number of copies for the cast and crew, and it literally took him weeks to accomplish the task trying to write when his shakiness was at its calmest moments. A Moon for the Misbegotten was published the year before his death in 1953, and he inscribed only a handful of copies to those closest to him. O’Neill was collected by book collectors during his lifetime, he cooperated with doing signed limited editions and signing books for friends and collectors. Over time virtually all his other plays published in his lifetime turn up in signed form, A Moon for the Misbegotten, is the great exception. Enclosed in a handsome custom clothd cloth box.