| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire under Democracy. By John Patrick Diggins. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xvi, 305 pp. $29.00, ISBN 978-0-226-14880-9.)

In this book, John Patrick Diggins sets out to move "beyond the aesthetic criteria of dramaturgy or the neurotic symptoms of psychology," which he considers the concerns of most Eugene O'Neill critics, and to study O'Neill as an intellectual (p. 5). Diggins characterizes his book as "a study of O'Neill's wrestling with the deceits of desire and power" endemic to American democracy (p. 9). After brief overview chapters on the playwright's life and ideas, the chapters on the plays are organized around a series of topics, such as anarchism, American history, and the themes of desire and possession, race, women and marriage, tragedy, and religion. Diggins devotes a final chapter to The Iceman Cometh (1940), reading the play as a representation of the death of desire and the end of history as well as a "dramatic discourse on the idea of pity and on the doctrinal contradictions of Christianity" (p. 247).

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