The Iceman Cometh

Eugene O'Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play, with a foreword by Harold Bloom

"We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality. . . . Life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion."--Harold Bloom, from the Introduction

The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams. Eugene O'Neill--the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature--completed Iceman in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play. Since then, The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature; many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama.


About the Author
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), the father of American drama, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. Harold Bloom (1930-2019) was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, and the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?