Eugene O'Neill, Hughie

Annalisa Brugnoli (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1958

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Play

Resources

Hughie is Eugene O’Neill’s last one-act and penultimate completed play. Conceived at the end of 1940 and concluded in 1942, it was envisioned as the fourth in a cycle of one-act plays entitled “By Way of Obit.” Plagued by physical and psychological ailments and by tremors that increasingly hindered his writing, O’Neill never finished the series, whose envisioned structure had to develop around a recurring pattern:

In each [play] the main character talks about a person who has died to a person who does little but listen. Via this monologue you get a complete picture of the person who has died – his or her whole life story – but just as complete a picture of the life and character of the narrator. A…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1681 words

Citation: Brugnoli, Annalisa. "Hughie". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 March 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4612, accessed 22 November 2024.]

Save this article