“[O’Neill] is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most.”—Harold Bloom
“[O’Neill] singlehandedly waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and oozing sticky goo, and alone and singlehanded bore out the water lily that no American had found there before him.”—George Jean Nathan
“O’Neill belongs to that group of American authors, which includes Farrell and Dreiser, whose choice of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph; all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the career they decreed for themselves by a relentless policing of their beat.”—Tony Kushner
“[O’Neill] singlehandedly waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and oozing sticky goo, and alone and singlehanded bore out the water lily that no American had found there before him.”—George Jean Nathan
“[O’Neill] is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most.”—Harold Bloom
“O’Neill belongs to that group of American authors, which includes Farrell and Dreiser, whose choice of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph; all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the career they decreed for themselves by a relentless policing of their beat.”—Tony Kushner
“O’Neill was not the first American to turn to one-act plays . . . but there is no doubt that . . . he perfected the form, just as Hemingway, a few years later, was to perfect the genre of the American short story.”—from the introduction by Robert Brustein
