Alex Haley 阿里克斯.哈利
Roots根
It is a painful record of the Black people falling into slavery and struggling to survive out of it. The book has produced a shock of recognition in readers both Black and White, the Black getting to know their true ancestry, and the white, some of at least, stirred by the extent of the injustice their race was capable of committing.
Chapter 19 Drama
Eugene O’Neil （尤金奥尼尔） (1888-1953)
Life story: His father was a famous actor. When he was young, he traveled with his father’s troupe here and there, so his love of drama was somewhat hereditary. He made friends with the lowest of society and got to know life better. He developed T.B in the winter of 1912-13, which was written into his Long Day’s Journey into Night.
1. He was regarded as father of American drama, America’s best playwright. He published 46 plays, 45 are tragedy.
2. Nobel Prize winner in 1936.
3. Theme: search for dream, for spiritual support, for belonging(identity), for communication, for harmony.
4. Style: symbolism
Best works:
The Hairy Ape: It concerns the problem of modern’ belonging. (p383)
Yank, a stoker on a luxury liner is the most powerful physically among the workers, but is nothing in the eyes of the upper class society. He realizes that he has no position in the society of the wealthy. Then he decides to work for the worker’s union, but is suspected as enemy agent, and driven out. Until now, he is forced to realize that he belongs nowhere. He feels frustrated, becomes violent. In his quest for self-identity, he wonders to the zoo where he finds the similarity with the hairy ape. He goes over to it, but the ape stretches out its arms and crushes him. He dies, without ever finding his place of belonging. The general feeling is despair: Man is rootless in an indifferent and impersonal world.
Long Day’s Journey into Night. It is somewhat autobiographical. In a figurative sense, it is a metaphor for O’Neil’s lifelong endeavor to find the truth and the way to acceptance. He found the former: the faithless, fragmentary nature of modern life. He couldn’t find the latter: for him, all passed into night. (p384-385)
Characters: father, James Tyrone, a famous actor;
mother, Mary Tyron, a drug addict( when giving birth to the younger son, takes drugs to relieve pain);
elder son, Jamie, loses faith in life and always looks for comfort in cups;
younger son, Edmund Tyron, developed TB. All the four suffer frustration and wish to escape from the harsh reality. They meet in the living room of the family’s summer home at 8:30 A.M of a day in August, 1912, and find fault with each other until midnight. The father is angry with the mother for her drug addiction, the mother with the father for his failure to offer her a home, the father with his sons for being good for nothing, and the sons with their parents for not being good parents. All are torn in a war between love and hate, and no one is sure which is the stronger emotion. The long day thus journeys into night: love gives its way to hate, day to night, and hope to despair  
The Iceman Cometh. It is about a group of people who live and can only live on illusion. (p384)

Elmer Rice
The Adding Machine P387  Mr. Zero has worked in a store for 25 years, doing the same job-adding figures- and is expecting a raise when his boss one day tell him that he has to leave because the store has bought adding machines. In a sudden fit of anger, he kills his boss with a bill file. He is tried, and condemned to death. A failure and a “waster product” of mechanization, he remains a zero” in modern life.
Machines turn people out of jobs and drive them to their doom. Modern life turns people into mechanical imbeciles. Mr. Zero, never having “missed a day, an hour, a minute” in his 25 years’ work adding figures, can no longer think except in terms of figures. Even when defending himself in the court room, he cannot help dragging in figures.

Clifford Odets
Theme: Quite a few of his plays concern the loneliness of modern life and the money success theme in American society.
Waiting for Lefty. It is about taxi driver’s strike, and gives authentic details of the life during the Depression. P391)

Tennessee Williams (one of the greatest dramatist)
The Glass Menagerie
It is a sad story of a family whose major problem is existential both physically and spiritually. The whole performance is pointed against modern civilization, which blasts happiness out of human existence. (p393-396)
Main characters:
Amanda: mother, always live in her memory/past. When Jim, Her son’s colleague comes to her home, she is even dressed in the dress of her youth.
Tom: run away into the exciting world of the movies.
Laura: slightly crippled, runs into her collection of glass animals (not living animal, not fight with each other, but fragile)
 All of them live in their own world and have no courage to face the reality. Then Jim comes( Tom intends to make him a boyfriend of Laura, but eventually he tells them he has a girlfriend). He tells Laura that she is pretty, and tries to encourage Laura to overcome her sense of inferiority (“I wish that you were my sister. I’d teach you to have some confidence in yourself”). Then he breaks Laura’s glass animal unintentionally: it is, to break their illusory world.
Subject matter: It is a spiritual tragedy, about mental conflicts of modern man.
 Conflicts between   dream and reality
                   Past and present
                   Illusion and disillusion

Arthur Miller
His play concerns the dilemma of modern man in relation to his family and work. The hero often find himself under a pressure from his society and its ethics, tries in vain to extricate himself from the physical and spiritual quandary, often in the form of actual and virtual suicide.
Death of a salesman
It is a sad version of the American dream.
Willy, the salesman of the title, keeps on dreaming of success and living in illusion and lies. He dreams of establishing his own business and owning a house where there would be space and light and leisure to live. He dreams of a big future for his children, who turn out to be good for nothing. After he is sacked, he decides to carry his dream with him to his grave and drives himself into an accident and dies willingly in order to secure the 25000 dollar life insurance money for his son. He thinks of death as means of achieving success (for his son, if not for himself any more). He俄ven dreams of vain glory in death(many people attending his funeral, and it will be proved that he is known .p399) In fact, the American obsession with financial success ruined him and other people like him.

Edward Albee
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?
His plays are about one problem, that is, the absurdity of human life built very much on a frail illusion and spiritual emptiness. (p402)
George and Martha are a middle-aged childless couple. Childlessness has been the source of a good deal of unhappiness for both. They revel, try to lose themselves in their cups, but deep down, the fact of childlessness keeps troubling them and fills them with a sense of loss which they cannot face with courage. Somehow they agree to pretend that they have a son who was born some 20 years ago, and that they should keep the secret between themselves. On the night before the supposed twenty-first birthday of their son, they invite a young couple, Nick and Honey to come and join them in their “games”. The four meet around two o’clock in the morning. Everybody drinks and turns quickly from mellowness to semi-insanity. It turns out that Nick is impotent and his wife is slim-hipped, and though they want desperately to have children, they cannot. Like the older couple they are doomed to a lonely and empty existence. By four o’clock in the morning everyone has gone practically insane.