The Iceman Cometh: The O'Neill Collection

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.

Selected by the Association of American University Presses as a University Press Book for Public and Secondary School Libraries, 2007

“We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality . . . life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion.”—from the foreword by Harold Bloom

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), the father of American drama, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, and the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

EUGENE O'NEILL mined the tragedies of his own life for this depiction of a seedy, skid row saloon in 1912, peopled by society's failures: worn-out anarchists, failed con artists, drifters, whores, pimps, and informers. The pipe-dreaming drunks of Harry Hope's bar numb themselves with rotgut gin and make grandiose plans while waiting for the annual appearance of the big-spending, fast-talking salesman, Hickey. But this year's visit fails to bring the expected good times, as a changed Hickey tries to rouse the barflies from their soothing stupor with a proselytizing message of salvation through self-knowledge. Considered by many to be the Nobel Prize-winning playwright's finest work, The Iceman Cometh exposes the human need for illusion as an antidote to despair. The recent internationally acclaimed production, starring Kevin Spacey, has highlighted anew the subversive genius of O'Neill's play.