Items

• Typed letter to Richard Madden

  This letter shows O’Neill’s enthusiasm toward the idea of Madden becoming his agent, and indicates the offer came earlier than biographers had previously thought.
• The Princeton Bric‐a‐Brac, Volume XXXII

  There are only two brief mentions of O’Neill in the yearbook from O’Neill’s freshman year at Princeton, after which he was expelled for, in his words, “general hell-raising.” This is not his personal copy.
• The Plays of Eugene O’Neill inscribed to Carlotta

  O’Neill inscribed this book to Carlotta in July 1951. Most likely Carlotta had pasted in the photographs and written the captions in the inside front board and endpapers years earlier. Both husband and wife had been suffering from poor health and hospital stays.
• The Old House Under the Elms brochure

  In 2001, Sandy Moffett, Consulting Director at the Grinnell College Department of Theatre, consulted with Liu Haiping from Nanjing University on the Zhengzhou Chu Opera Company’s adaptation of Desire Under the Elms in central China. They brought the production to Grinnell the following year.
• The Moon of the Caribbees with drawing and inscription

  Pencil drawing by O'Neill of set for “In the Zone” on cast of characters page of David Belasco's copy of the book, likely done in 1925. Robert Sisk obtained the volume at a later date, with the O'Neill inscription to Sisk penned in the 1930's.
• The Fountain Contract

  Fully signed with holograph correction by Eugene O’Neill. The Fountain was an expressionistic costume drama about Ponce de Leon that dealt more directly with man’s quest for God than his realism plays could. Neither he nor the critics were satisfied with the results on stage.
• The First Man - Pre-Show Remarks

  Pre-show remarks for 2023 staged reading of The First Man by Eugene O'Neill at Washington University in St. Louis for the Eugene O'Neill Symposium. The remarks were written by dramaturg Beth Wynstra and read by Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature, Henry Schvey.
• The Emperor Jones ; Diff'rent ; The straw inscribed by Paul Robeson

  Inscribed by Paul Robeson, who was the Provincetown Players’ first choice to play the title role in the premiere of The Emperor Jones in 1920 but turned it down. In 1924 however, he starred in the revival and in All God’s Chillun Got Wings
• The Dreamy Kid in Theatre Arts Magazine

  O’Neill’s early one-act play about an African-American gangster who risks visiting his dying grandmother despite having killed a white man the night before.
• Scrapbook detailing Carlotta Monterey's career

  Monterey had a successful acting career, as chronicled in this scrapbook. She played the lead female role in The Hairy Ape but did not make an impression on O’Neill until they met again six years later when they both were vacationing in Maine. When they married in 1929, it was Monterey’s fourth and O’Neill’s third but the one that would last.
• Ronán Noone, photograph by Alison Carrick
• Program for Beyond the Horizon

  O’Neill’s debut on Broadway was hastily rehearsed and shoddily produced but received high praise from critics and audiences and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.
• Program for All God's Chillun Got Wings

  This play about an interracial marriage caused strong controversy on both sides of the racial divide in a heavily segregated America. It also launched the influential acting career of Paul Robeson who would also find success as a singer and activist.
• Photograph of Monte Cristo Cottage

  The house in New London, CT named after the play that made James O’Neill a theatre star and where Eugene grew up with his brother James. It is the setting of his late masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night and now a National Historic Landmark.
• Photograph from Long Day’s Journey Into Night premiere

  O’Neill’s plays were widely popular in Sweden and Carlotta selected the Royal Dramatic Theatre to premiere the play O’Neill had stipulated in 1945 never be performed. It was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and began an international O’Neill renaissance.
• O'Neill : Son and Playwright by Louis Sheaffer, inscribed

  This biography and its second volume, O'Neill, Son and Artist (1973) were considered the definitive studies of O’Neill’s life and work. The Hammerman Collection includes numerous letters between Sheaffer and family, friends and associates of O’Neill’s.
• More of a Long Story by Sheila O’Neill

  Hammerman self-published this book of recollections, childhood drawing and vintage photographs about growing up as Shane O’Neill’s daughter. Shane was Eugene and Agnes O’Neill’s son. The title is a play on the title of Agnes’ book, Part of a Long Story: Eugene O’Neill as a Young Man in Love.
• Monte Cristo, Detroit Opera House, Liebler and Co.'s revival, 1890 October 28

  By the time of this Liebler and Co.'s revival, the theatre star James O’Neill had been playing the title role in the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo for 15 years, and he would be tied to it for the rest of his acting career, including a film version in 1913.
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night agreement

  Written at Tao House, Long Day’s Journey Into Night was O’Neill’s most intimately autobiographical of plays. Though his brother, mother and father were long-since dead by this time, he wanted assurance it would not be published for 25 years after his own death.
• Katie Johnson, photograph by Andrew Lee