Items

• Eugene O'Neill Symposium - Beth Wynstra

  Symposium Plenary Lecture, Beth Wynstra (Babson College), author of VOWS VEILS AND MASKS: THE PERFORMANCE OF MARRIAGE IN THE PLAYS OF EUGENE O'NEILL (University of Iowa Press 2023)  "Between the Covers: Roles, Performance, and Eugene O’Neill in Early 20th Century Women’s Magazines" Illusion making. Conditioned spousal behavior. Double standards. Strategic infidelity. Such are fundamental elements in Eugene O’Neill’s plays focused on marriage. Yet these elements have significance off the stage as well. In prominent and high-circulating publications geared to women such as Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Vogue, and Ladies Home Journal, 20th century wives and hopeful brides were encouraged, through articles, advice columns, and advertisements, to be dynamic performers who mask honest feelings and abide by set roles. The very women who brought O’Neill’s characters to life felt the pressures of these culturally constructed expectations around marriage. Actors like Alla Nazimova, Louise Closser Hale, and Claudette Colbert navigated in worlds that judged them harshly for deviating from matrimonial rules they did not create. While past scholars have seen and labeled the wife characters in O’Neill’s plays as “shrewish,” “vindictive,” and even as “cannibals,” an analysis of these characters that takes into account crucial cultural context reveals something else altogether. In this presentation, I offer new possibilities for studying marriages and wife characters in literary and dramatic texts. These new possibilities include a recognition, and, hopefully, a rectifying of past patriarchal approaches that can reduce a complex individual to a simple role.
• Eugene O'Neill standing on balcony with countryside in background

  On the verso Carlotta inscribed, in part: “We went here (from France) for a change of scene & for O’Neill to make the final cuts and revisions on “Morning Becomes Electra.”
• Eugene O'Neill dressed in robe, lying on grassy hill with Blemie

  The O’Neills and their beloved dog Blemie moved back to the U.S. in 1931. Taken in Northport, Long Island. Inscribed by Carlotta on verso.
• Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill sitting on beach, looking at each other

  The Hammerman Collection includes eight photos of the O’Neills' vacationing at Las Palmas, Canary Islands. Like other photos of them from the early Thirties, they are often inscribed by one or both of them.
• Diary of O’Neill’s symptoms maintained by Carlotta

  Carlotta dedicated her time tending to her husband, both for his solitude needed to write and for his physical ailments that more and more interfered with his ability to write.
• Desire Under the Elms movie lobby cards

  The film adaptation of O’Neill’s controversial play inspired by the Euripides play Hippolytus was widely panned by critics. The play has seen numerous revivals over the decades, most recently in 2021, and was adapted for the opera in 1978.
• Days Without End galley proof inscribed to Robert Sisk

  Anxious to avoid errors in his treatment of Catholicism in Days Without End, O'Neill had Robert Sisk, now a movie executive, send a copy of the play to Martin Quigley, a publisher of film magazines and a power in Catholic circles. This proof also contains holograph notes by O’Neill.
• Carlotta Monterey O’Neill to Robert and Cepha Sisk

  This short letter captures the grief and loneliness Carlotta felt upon the death of her husband. She describes the final days and immediate aftermath, and mentions her own poor health, which she had been struggling with for years while also caring for O’Neill.
• Carlotta Monterey O’Neill to Leon Mirlas

  As this letter shows, Carlotta had to respond to more of O’Neill’s correspondence as his health deteriorated.
• Beth Wynstra and a slide from her presentation
• Associate producer agreement for The Iceman Cometh

  The Hammerman Collection includes numerous contracts related to the production of O’Neill’s return to Broadway after a 12-year absence.
• Assembled Playwright Tour: Part 7

  The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. This exhibition was curated by Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts Curator Joel Minor. It is organized into seven sections, the first of which focuses on Harley Hammerman and his collection, with the remainder on chronological phases of O'Neill's life and work. The University Libraries honored Hammerman and celebrated the collection with a Eugene O’Neill symposium on October 6, 2023. Minor and Hammerman led a tour of the exhibition that day and repeated the tour to be video recorded on December 10, 2023. The exhibition catalog is available online as a PDF, which you can access at https://library.wustl.edu/exhibitions/assembled-playwright/ You can also request a printed version be mailed to you.
• Assembled Playwright Tour: Part 6

  The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. This exhibition was curated by Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts Curator Joel Minor. It is organized into seven sections, the first of which focuses on Harley Hammerman and his collection, with the remainder on chronological phases of O'Neill's life and work. The University Libraries honored Hammerman and celebrated the collection with a Eugene O’Neill symposium on October 6, 2023. Minor and Hammerman led a tour of the exhibition that day and repeated the tour to be video recorded on December 10, 2023. The exhibition catalog is available online as a PDF, which you can access at https://library.wustl.edu/exhibitions/assembled-playwright/ You can also request a printed version be mailed to you.
• Assembled Playwright Tour: Part 5

  The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. This exhibition was curated by Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts Curator Joel Minor. It is organized into seven sections, the first of which focuses on Harley Hammerman and his collection, with the remainder on chronological phases of O'Neill's life and work. The University Libraries honored Hammerman and celebrated the collection with a Eugene O’Neill symposium on October 6, 2023. Minor and Hammerman led a tour of the exhibition that day and repeated the tour to be video recorded on December 10, 2023. The exhibition catalog is available online as a PDF, which you can access at https://library.wustl.edu/exhibitions/assembled-playwright/ You can also request a printed version be mailed to you.
• Assembled Playwright Tour: Part 4

  The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. This exhibition was curated by Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts Curator Joel Minor. It is organized into seven sections, the first of which focuses on Harley Hammerman and his collection, with the remainder on chronological phases of O'Neill's life and work. The University Libraries honored Hammerman and celebrated the collection with a Eugene O’Neill symposium on October 6, 2023. Minor and Hammerman led a tour of the exhibition that day and repeated the tour to be video recorded on December 10, 2023. The exhibition catalog is available online as a PDF, which you can access at https://library.wustl.edu/exhibitions/assembled-playwright/ You can also request a printed version be mailed to you.
• Assembled Playwright Tour: Part 3

  The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. This exhibition was curated by Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts Curator Joel Minor. It is organized into seven sections, the first of which focuses on Harley Hammerman and his collection, with the remainder on chronological phases of O'Neill's life and work. The University Libraries honored Hammerman and celebrated the collection with a Eugene O’Neill symposium on October 6, 2023. Minor and Hammerman led a tour of the exhibition that day and repeated the tour to be video recorded on December 10, 2023. The exhibition catalog is available online as a PDF, which you can access at https://library.wustl.edu/exhibitions/assembled-playwright/ You can also request a printed version be mailed to you.
• Assembled Playwright Tour: Part 2

  The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. This exhibition was curated by Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts Curator Joel Minor. It is organized into seven sections, the first of which focuses on Harley Hammerman and his collection, with the remainder on chronological phases of O'Neill's life and work. The University Libraries honored Hammerman and celebrated the collection with a Eugene O’Neill symposium on October 6, 2023. Minor and Hammerman led a tour of the exhibition that day and repeated the tour to be video recorded on December 10, 2023. The exhibition catalog is available online as a PDF, which you can access at https://library.wustl.edu/exhibitions/assembled-playwright/ You can also request a printed version be mailed to you.
• Assembled Playwright Tour: Part 1

  The Assembled Playwright exhibition presents highlights from the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. The exhibition includes manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, inscribed books, and other unique and rare materials by and pertinent to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. This exhibition was curated by Modern Literature Collection and Manuscripts Curator Joel Minor. It is organized into seven sections, the first of which focuses on Harley Hammerman and his collection, with the remainder on chronological phases of O'Neill's life and work. The exhibition catalog is available online as a PDF, which you can access at https://library.wustl.edu/exhibitions/assembled-playwright/ You can also request a printed version be mailed to you.
• Annie Chaplin to Harley Hammerman

  Harley befriended Annie, seventh child of Charlie and Oona Chaplin who grew up in Switzerland with her family. She spoke at the centenary celebration at Washington University and showed a short film she starred in which was adapted from “Before Breakfast.”
• Ah, Wilderness! First trade edition inscribed

  Dr. George Draper was a pioneer in the practice of psychosomatic medicine. He was O'Neill's physician from 1930 until the playwright moved to the West Coast in 1936. O’Neill wrote in the book, “To George Draper / Hoping that this will hit him, too, in a mellow nostalgic spot!”