Hughie

More about the book

In this previously unpublished work Eugene O'Neill returned to an earlier form with which he had experimented—the one-act play. Only two characters appear on stage; Hughie, the third and most important on, is dead. It is Hughie's innocence, gullibility, and need to believe in a far more exciting existence than he ever knew which gives some kind of purpose to the shabby lives of the two who remain. O'Neill here again writes of the defeated and the courage that comes by way of illusions reflecting still other illusions in a world that needs them all. Hughie, the only surviving manuscript from a series of eight one-act monologue plays that O'Neill planned in 1940, was completed in 1941.