Maurice Browne and the Chicago Little Theatre

Abstract

The recent revival of interest in Eugene O'Neill has a certain polemical, even ideological bias: the revival has occasioned very little research into or argument about O'Neill's sources and influences because it depends on the assumption of O'Neill as initiator, as the origin of American drama. A sampling of two scholarly books from the 1950s and one from the 1980s should indicate sufficiently the manner in which O'Neill has been deprived of his ancestry.