Transfiguring Tragedy: Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche in Eugene O'Neill's Early Plays

This book demonstrates Eugene O’Neill’s use of philosophy in the early period of his work and provides analyses of selected works from that era, concluding with The Hairy Ape, completed in 1921, as an illustration of the mastery he had achieved in dramatizing key concepts of philosophy.

Analyses of one-act and full-length plays from 1913 to 1921 reveal the influence of the three philosophers and establish that O’Neill was fundamentally a philosophic playwright, even from his earliest dramati...