This text explores the creative processes in four classic works: "Death in Venice", "Treasure Island", "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" and "War and Peace". It considers how each of these works was compelled by an urgent life problem - conscious or unconscious - of its author.
An exploration of the creative process in four classic works: Death in Venice, Treasure Island, The Rubáiyát of Mar Khayyám, and War and Peace. Creating Literature Out of Life examines four very dissimilar masterpieces and their authors in search of evidence that will answer some of the many questions in the great mystery of creativity. Crossing boundaries of period, nation, and genre, the study looks into the "why" and "how" of the creation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Mar Khayyám, and Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace. Doris Alexander finds that each of these works was compelled by an urgent life problem of its author, some of them partly conscious, others completely unconscious, which worked in harmony and counterpoint with the author's conscious theme to shape his work. She traces an interconnected nexus of memories—personal experiences, ideas, readings—that came alive in response to the author's problem and served as a reservoir out of which his characters, his images, his story line, and the emotional tone of his work emerged. Creating Literature Out of Life tells the exciting story of how Mann, Stevenson, FitzGerald, and Tolstoy fought out their major life battles in their works.
In Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle, Doris Alexander gives us a new kind of inside biography that begins where the others leave off. It follows O'Neill through the door into his writing room to give a blow-by-blow account of how he fought out in his plays his great life battles—love against hate, doubt against belief, life against death—to an ever-expanding understanding. It presents a new kind of criticism, showing how O'Neill's most intimate struggles worked their way to resolution through the drama of his plays. Alexander reveals that he was engineering his own consciousness through his plays and solving his life problems—while the tone, imagery, and richness of the plays all came out of the nexus of memories summoned up by the urgency of the problems he faced in them. By the way of O'Neill, this study moves toward a theory of the impulse that sets off a writer's creativity, and a theory of how that impulse acts to shape a work, not only in a dramatist like O'Neill but also in the case of writers in other mediums, and even of painters and composers. The study begins with Desire Under the Elms because that play's plot was consolidated by a dream that opened up the transfixing grief that precipitated the play for O'Neill, and it ends with Days Without End when he had resolved his major emotional-philosophical struggle and created within himself the voice of his final great plays. Since the analysis brings to bear on the plays all of his conscious decisions, ideas, theories, as well as the life-and-death struggles motivating them, documenting even the final creative changes made during rehearsals, this book provides a definitive account of the nine plays analyzed in detail (Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, and Days Without End, with additional analysis of plays written before and after.
This study draws on new and unprecedented research concerning the lives of Eugene O’Neill, his family, and his circle. It corrects and expands the biographical record on O’Neill, sharpens our understanding of his art, and distinguishes the man and his life more clearly than ever from the creations that were inspired by, and drew on, that life.In his final creative years, 1939 to 1943, O’Neill wrote The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Because these plays are so intense, intimate, and evocative of the friends and family members who influenced O’Neill’s artistic development, biographers and critics have long—and mistakenly—regarded them as accurate sources for insights into the playwright’s early years.Drawing upon interviews and a staggering amount of archival research into multiple generations of the O’Neill family, Alexander sets the historical record straight by documenting the actual people and situations on which characters and scenes in O’Neill’s last plays are based. Included in her study are such topics as the playwright’s attempted suicide, his tuberculosis, and his relationship with his parents. By revealing the distinctions between O’Neill’s life and his art, Alexander’s findings make possible greater insight into the artistry that shaped these final plays and brought them to life.
