Desire Under The Elms
Eugene O'Neill
Read January 2009
Copy: Mine
Essay written Saturnday, March 7th, 2009
I'm not sure where or when I picked up my copy of this play. Some library used book sale somewhere, sometime. Years ago. I figured, at the time, Eugene O'Neill was an author I had heard of but hadn't read anything by, so I should pick this up and read him, so I would be educated. So I did, and the book sat on my shelf -- and for a long time in a box somewhere -- for years.
This book is actually three plays: Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, and the Morning Becomes Electra trilogy. I only read the first one, which happened to be the shortest.
Did people really talk like that in New England 150 years ago? Like they were from Kentucky? I don't know, but it was annoying. That was why I couldn't get past the first few chapters of Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. The author was trying to be all colloquial but it ended up just sounding stupid, to my ears. Same here, with Desire Under The Elms, but at least it was short. And since it was a play, rather than a novel, it was easier to dismiss the affectations of dialect. That was a great sentence, and it almost made it sound like I know what I'm talking about.
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