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  • Editor’s Foreword
  • William Davies King

“Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room.” These often-quoted, deathbed words of Eugene O’Neill perfectly capture a pathetic irony of America’s most accomplished playwright—the homelessness of a many-mansioned celebrity author. He does not mention that both hotel rooms in question were first-class residential suites, the first with a view of Times Square, the last looking on the Charles River in Boston. He occupied many rooms in between, but with the exception of a few, notably the one upstairs from Jimmie the Priest’s, they were all decent accommodations. We need not picture our Nobel Prize-winning playwright coping with thin towels and a Gideon Bible at some EconoLodge or Dew Drop Inn, and even the most rustic of houses in which he lived, at Peaked Hill Bar, came to him with exquisite tableware left behind by its former owner, Mabel Dodge, and a luminous interior paint job courtesy of Robert Edmond Jones. Monte Cristo Cottage was no Newport mansion, but for a house on the shore it was spacious, well crafted, and on the right avenue.

The implication that he lacked a home, in short, does not bear out, at least in any way that architecture and furnishings can measure. O’Neill’s sense of homelessness had, instead, to be measured by the heart—feelings of not belonging, shattered security, and absent connection. His plays insistently uncover, and shelter, these feelings in characters familiar and strange. His life story records a series of gestures to repair his interrupted sense of home. Out of that uneasy sense of place (topos) came a topic of critical investigation of his life and work. As far back as 2006, the good people at McFarland sensed the emergence of new ways of reading the self-reflexive plays of O’Neill—major and minor—in conversation with the tortuous pathway of his life. [End Page V] They approached Cynthia McCown, the O’Neill Society’s long-time board member and inveterate organizer of conference panels, with the idea of putting together an anthology.

By 2010 she had a working title, “‘Homemade’: Eugene O’Neill and Domesticity,” and she began collecting essays. The topic morphed a bit with some of the submissions, but there were numerous similar publishing projects developing in this period, including another McFarland anthology, one by Palgrave Macmillan, Robert M. Dowling’s multiauthored Critical Companion, and Steven Bloom’s multiauthored Critical Insights. Furthermore, the O’Neill Review was back in operation after a short hiatus. So, at last, the McCown/McFarland volume did not come to fruition, and instead the core of that work has come home, as it were, to the O’Neill Society through this journal, with other elements possibly to arrive in future issues. The first five essays in this issue were all written around 2010–11 with the idea that they would be used in the anthology, which had acquired a new working title: “Searching for the Magic Door: Eugene O’Neill, Domesticity and Dispossession.” We are grateful to McCown and McFarland for instigating and preliminarily shaping this project. In the next phase, the authors have done excellent revisionary work, bringing their essays up to date and altering citations to our cherished Chicago style (deep dish).

Andrew Lee’s essay on More Stately Mansions at one point suitably preceded his essay on the image of the Irish in O’Neill, which appeared in the O’Neill Review in 2014, and now it aptly follows it with a minute examination of what became of the marriage of the Irish Melody family into the blueblood Harfords. He develops his argument in response to Laurin Porter’s reading of More Stately Mansions, which appeared in the 1995 O’Neill Review. Porter had initially intended to follow up on her own essay in the McCown volume, and now we can hope that she will offer us her further thoughts in response to Lee’s reinterpretation.

Patrick Maley counters some of the critical abuse taken by the 2009 production of Desire Under the Elms with an illuminating study of how Robert Falls, as director, found extraordinary means to...

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