George Bernard Shaw called him a ‘Yankee Shakespeare peopling his isle with Calibans’. He was dubbed ‘a fighting Tolstoy’ and ‘the great American blues man of the theatre’. Before he was 35, Eugene O’Neill had emerged as the first real titan of American theatre, a preeminence he has never lost.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £17 Tel: 08430 600033. Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature at the University of East Anglia, and was a judge of this year’s Man Booker prize.
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