The Iceman Cometh

by Harold Bloom (Foreword), Eugene O'Neill (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $14.99

  Eugene O'Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

• Used

  Paperback
  1966

  $4.69

  The Place: Harry Hope's bar, a cheap gin-mill of the five-cent whiskey, last-resort variety situated downtown on the West Side of New York. The Time: Salesman Hickey's birthday celebration, two days during the summer of 1912 -- a time when all tomorrows are forced abruptly to become today; when the delineation between hopes, dreams, and pipe dreams disintegrates; when self-knowledge destroys self-respect, compassion -- and life. One of the last of Eugene O'Neill's plays, The Iceman Cometh stands today with Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten as the supreme expression of his dramatic genius. From the Trade Paperback edition.

• New

  Paperback
  1994

  $14.48

  Into a waterfront bar, full of life's failures, subsisting solely on their dreams, comes Hickey with his urge to make them face the truth. This play, first staged in 1946, is written by the author of Anna Christie and Strange Interlude, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.