By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill

By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill by Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb

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"One is dragged into the very presence of a genius and made to feel his awful size," cautioned Arthur Miller, comment on O'Neill, Arthur and Barbara Gelb's highly praised first exploration of the life and work of tormented playwright Eugene O'Neill. As Miller's words suggest, the accolades O'Neill won in his lifetime battle to transform American theater seemed to be both compliment and warning.

Beyond the close circle of friends and colleagues, and, of course, the plays themselves, there was little else by which to know the man behind the curtain when the Gelbs first began their research. In the decades that followed, much new material on O'Neill's early years came to light and became the focus of their second book. But it was not until a trove of letters and diaries belonging to O'Neill and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, was released that a more fully rounded picture of O'Neill could emerge. Readers of this final volume will find it is worth the wait.

By Women Possessed opens in 1928 as Strange Interlude debuts on Broadway to stunning reviews. In eleven days, Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey will be eloping to France. Monterey will bear the weight of being the last woman in O'Neill's life. And she will be the one to shield both man and legacy from the ghosts of the three women who came before: his previous two wives and the mother who regretted his birth.

A great beauty possessed of a comfortable income, Monterey was to introduce O'Neill to the finer things in life: expensive cars, bespoke clothing, and impeccably run homes. And O'Neill -- handsome, charming, dangerous -- would take Monterey to the borderline where creativity and madness collide. Their monumental quarrels became the stuff of legend. Yet, after his death in 1953, when it seemed O'Neill had faded from the public eye, it was Monterey's canny decisions that sealed his reputation. Controlling the plays, she chose who would mount the revival of The Iceman Cometh and the premiere of Long Day's Journey into Night, which guaranteed O'Neill a permanent place in the theater.

Seasoned by a lifetime of experience with their subject, the Gelbs' final work offers a masterly portrait of an emotionally damaged virtuoso and his troubled marriage. And, in the end, O'Neill and Monterey's broken love story offers a penetrating lens through which to examine the psychological snare that ushered forth O'Neill's plays.

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G.P. Putnam's Sons, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2016