Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb in Trinity College Dublin.
© GELB PERSONAL COLLECTION 2016
Page Turner / Edited by Peter McDermott
Nine years after the 1953 death of playwright Eugene O’Neill, the first major biography of him appeared.
“O’Neill needed this book,” wrote Arthur Miller, “We all did. The theater will always need it, for most of the time it is in the hands of triflers who will forever need the towering rebuke of his life and his work and his agony.”
Another giant of the American stage, Moss Hart, had offered advance praise: “This book has the bravura, the power, and the grandeur of O’Neill’s plays. It is as compelling, as crammed and as crowded with drama.”
“O’Neill” was admired by President Kennedy who chose it for inclusion in the newly organized White House Library.
The authors were journalists Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, New Yorkers like their subject, who is the only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature born in the city. They followed up in 2000 with “O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo.” Finally, early in the new century, they decided to do an entirely new biography.
“A little more than 125 years after his birth, we mined the previously unavailable diaries of O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, and disclosures withheld by his intimates until after her death, as well as much additional material,” Barbara Gelb said. “The book reassesses the previously underestimated influence of O’Neill’s mother, as well as evidence of his unabashed, lifelong yearning for a loving, all-embracing maternal figure.”
The result, “By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O’Neill,” commented the New York Post, is “fascinating.”
The Publishers Weekly reviewer added: “This is a compelling examination of one of the 20th century’s most passionate and troubled minds, and a prime example of expert, diligent and wryly editorial biographical research.”
"Besides drawing a precise and stirring portrait of the genre-defining writer’s tortured and inspired career, the Gelbs,” Harper’s Bazaar said, “also present a fascinating account of the world of American theater in the first half of the 20th century.”
Eugene O’Neill.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Barbara Gelb
Date of birth: Feb. 6, 1926.
Place of birth: Manhattan
Husband: Arthur Gelb (deceased)
Children: Michael Gelb and Peter Gelb
Published works: Along with Arthur Gelb, we are the authors of the newly released “By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O’Neill,” “O’Neill (1962)” and “O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo” (2000). O’Neill devotees since high school, we began our first O’Neill book when Arthur was 32 and I was 30.
I am also the author of “So Short a Time,” a biography of John Reed (author of “Ten Days That Shook the World”) and Louise Bryant (O’Neill's great lost love), and the one-woman play “My Gene,” in which Carlotta—confined to a psychiatric hospital during her final years—confronts O'Neill's ghost with her sometimes delusional memories of their tumultuous coupling.
What is your writing routine? Are there ideal conditions?
A quiet room, organized research, a functioning PC, and trimmed fingernails
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
I'm not much of an advice-giver. Writing demands dedication, resilience, endurance and super self-confidence. Unless you are driven, I'd advise picking a less stressful way to be creative.
Name three books that are memorable in terms of your reading pleasure.
Most recently, I have enjoyed “The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life” by John le Carré; “His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt” by Joseph Lelyveld; “Broken Harbor” by Tana French.
What book are you currently reading?
Ian McEwen's “Nutshell.”
Is there a book you wish you had written?
“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen.
Name a book that you were pleasantly surprised by.
“The Eustace Diamonds”; a friend introduced me to Anthony Trollope in my early 20s, and I have been reading and re-reading his amazing dozens of novels ever since.
If you could meet one author, living or dead, who would it be?
Probably Shakespeare -- if that's who he really was.
What book changed your life?
No specific book. What changed my life was the habit of reading, beginning as a child, when someone started me on the Nancy Drew mystery series. I've been an addicted reader ever since.
What is your favorite spot in Ireland?
I love the city of Dublin.
You're Irish if...
You are willing to devote 50 years to trying to understand a complicated Irish writer like Eugene O'Neill.
