O’Neill understood that The Iceman Cometh was probably the best play he had ever written, and he deliberately delayed production until after the war’s conclusion. O’Neill coyly refers here to his tragic masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night. You can’t keep a hop head off his dope for long!” (510). after a lapse of several months spent with an ear glued to the radio for war news.
Two weeks later, however, O’Neill wrote to producer Lawrence Langner: “I’m working again on something. With so much tragic drama happening in the world, it is hard to take theatre seriously” (O’Neill 508). “The war news,” O’Neill wrote his daughter Oona O’Neill after completing The Iceman Cometh, “has affected my ability to concentrate on my job. O’Neill wrote The Iceman Cometh at Tao House, his home in Danville, California, between June 8 and November 26, 1939, and completed a near-final draft in December 1939-one of the most horrifying periods in modern history: Hitler’s army invaded Poland and commenced a policy of genocide against Jews and other populations of Europe, Great Britain and France subsequently declared war on Germany, the United States was still caught in the devastating throws of the Great Depression, and the Far East had plunged into a gruesome conflict that would end with the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five years later.
“In bomb shelters,” writes Travis Bogard, “men do not behave very differently, perhaps, from the way they behave in The Iceman Cometh” (421–422). The action takes place in a downtown Manhattan saloon and “Raines-Law” hotel called Harry Hope’s and covers two days in the life of a motley assortment of anarchists, prostitutes, pimps, and war veterans, among a host of other “lost souls” hiding behind pipe dreams and alcoholism to shield themselves from the terrorizing realities of modern-day life.
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman ComethĮugene O’Neill’s reputation as the United States’ “master of the misbegotten” culminates in his late masterpiece The Iceman Cometh.
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