When All God's Chillun Got Wings opened on 15 May 1924 at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, Eugene O'Neill's third and last play to focus substantially on the African-American experience, it was already in the midst of a storm of controversy. The racial emphasis in this controversy may well explain O'Neill's failure to write additional plays in which the focus on blacks would lead critics and playgoers away from O'Neill's personal, primary aesthetic concerns. A play about a relationship between a black man and a white woman, it had evoked, for weeks prior to its opening, passionate feelings from whites and blacks, critics and theatergoers, New Yorkers and outsiders, private citizens and government officials. In fact,—now an item of theatrical lore—the mayor of New York, responding to the animus toward the play generated particularly by rumors that the black actor Paul Robeson was to kiss the white hand of Mary Blair, tried to prevent its opening by preventing children's participation as called for in the first act of the script. For this reason, the director, James Light, read the first scene on opening night, and the stage manager did the same for subsequent performances. This dissonance, this tempest of disagreements, accompanied the initial performance, and the passage of time has not really brought an end to the spirit of controversy surrounding the play. Admittedly, the critical focus on the play has turned from a racial to a biographical emphasis, but there does not exist a critical/scholarly consensus on either the quality of the play or on the aesthetic dynamics of the work and the best way to approach them. Perhaps, then, yet another perspective is warranted.

Whereas the play's conclusion remains the most elusive aesthetic conundrum, a comment by the always perceptive, always stimulating Travis Bogard in Contour in Time suggests the breadth of the artistic and critical mystery that the play embodies and poses. Bogard writes, presumably prompted by the challenge of the play itself and by O'Neill's comments relative to it: "Whatever O'Neill meant by the play's `real intention,' what he has accomplished is, for 1924, a bold treatment of the social and personal problems that emerge from an interracial marriage" (193). O'Neill's comment, to which Bogard refers, relates to the furor surrounding the original run. O'Neill later said: "the suggestion that miscegenation would be treated in the theater obscured the real intention of the play" (qtd. in Gelb 555). Although Arthur and Barbara Gelb must receive due credit for initiating, in the 1960s, the refocusing of critical energy toward the play's biographical roots, O'Neill's comment is, of course, germane to their contribution as well as to all facets of the 80 year-long debate about the play. To attempt, then, to unlock the mystery embedded in the play as reflected in O'Neill's puzzling comment is the burden of this paper.

Is it possible that yet another look at the play itself will clarify what remains obscure or, at least, critically in dispute? Will such reconsideration suggest whether the play's characters are realistic or figureheads in a work of social protest on the race issue? Might we come nearer to deciding whether the language is melodramatic; or ethnically appropriate; or, perhaps, even poetic? Will we obtain any better handle on the biographical and racial dimensions of the play and on how, as various critics have suggested, they are interwoven? Above all, will our analysis shine a more direct light on O'Neill's overall aesthetic intention and provide us with a means to perceive more clearly the relation of Chillun to the other works in the O'Neill canon?

In the hope that our journey will yield a convincing perspective or, at least, valuable hints on some of the aforementioned matters, this paper proposes a hypothetical framework for analysis and understanding of the play. That framework is expressed in the paper's title: "Making It, Madness, and Motherhood: the Deep Structure of All God's Chillun Got Wings." More specifically, this tripartite perspective is proposed as corresponding to the essential form of the play allied to its ethos and, parenthetically, to a fundamental strain in O'Neill's inner world. Finally, this paper asserts that this tripartite artistic arrangement as found in All God's Chillun Got Wings is in a pure state, a state in which the three segments are complete and easily perceivable, and that that actuality makes the play particularly helpful in assessing the artistic intentions of O'Neill's other works.

Exclusive of the ending, Chillun portrays the tortured relationship and deterioration of the marriage of a black man, Jim Harris, and a white woman, Ella Downey. We encounter them initially as children playing where each wishes to be complexioned as the other is and where they become enamored of each other. As time passes, Jim, a studious boy, retains his powerful affection for Ella, but she, beginning when she is a teenager, rejects him because he is black. In adult life, Jim continually fails a law school entrance exam because he has internalized white America's deprecatory attitude toward blacks. Meanwhile, Ella has a destructive relationship with a white neighborhood ruffian, later a boxer; loses his affection; becomes a prostitute; and loses a child. Jim is kind to her throughout this difficult period, and she, with gratitude and hope, accepts an offer of marriage from the worshipful Jim; they sail to France to make a life for themselves outside of racist America. Despite the briefly hopeful prospect conveyed through their marriage and escape, it is noteworthy that Jim's role has been, is, and will be essentially nurturing—maternal—whereas Ella is possessed of the racial attitudes of oppressive, paternalistic white society.

Upon their return, after two years, to the US, we find that the experience abroad was problematic and they, in serious distress, meteorically decline as individuals and as a couple. The primary cause of their difficulty is Ella's inescapable hatred of blacks. They reveal, to Jim's conservative mother and black activist sister, that they have lived one year asexually and the second reclusively abroad. Again, parenthetically, it is well to note the dualistic portrait of Hattie: at once, loving to Jim yet aggressive—masculine—in her criticism of him and treatment of Ella.

Although their return is made in the hope of overcoming the challenge of racism, Ella's own racism overwhelms them. She becomes mentally ill, made more so by the proximity of a Congo mask, symbolic of the black African heritage, hanging in the apartment that Jim's mother gives to the couple. Ella deprecates Jim and his family, purposefully attempts to undermine Jim's efforts to study for the law exam, attempts to kill Jim with a knife, is joyful when he fails his exam, and even calls him "nigger" (311). Throughout all this anguishing experience, Jim cares lovingly for Ella; refuses to send her to an asylum, as suggested by his sister; and forgives Ella for all of her hate-filled actions toward him. When she goes completely insane, regressing into childhood, he commits himself again to caring for her and accommodates her deranged fantasy of childhood. Despite the tragic trajectory and substance of Chillun, the play ends affirmatively with Jim's incorporating Ella's regression into an ecstatic vision of harmony in heaven.

Even this cursory, selective, skeletal plot summary suggests possible answers to some of the questions posed earlier. First, it is clear that all the major characters have been deeply—perceptively—rendered as realistic figures, but they also serve as symbolic elements in the process of projecting imaginatively, as does the plot itself, the unhealthy, life-denying racial conditions in America—and, especially, as they apply to the inner lives of the principal characters and their relationship. The language faithfully and believably conveys the nature of the characters, their personalities, and the essential plot information, through both dialogue and stage directions, but it also embodies ethnic and social class nuances, theatrical intensities, and also works expressionistically on occasion—as with the use of the word "nigger"—to stir psycho-social feelings and awareness of the social environment. The realistic and expressionistic play elements cohere so gracefully because the social and personal play components are thoroughly intertwined. The initial scenes of child's play, coupled with the quasi-geometric separating of blacks and whites, for example, constitute a sociological commentary by O'Neill, but they also are and become the present and past of Jim and Ella and the fabric of their thinking and their psychological dynamics.

Theatrically, too, everything coheres. The play is suspenseful; the scenes end in emotional crescendos; the plot moves through heights and valleys—both for the individuals and the couple; the traditional tragic technique of projecting a metaphoric escape for the characters prior to their decline is here, as is their thoroughgoing social and psychological devastation before the final ecstatic vision, a characteristic of religious drama.

The play's primary conflict is trivalent—pitting the characters against themselves, pitting the couple against each other, with Ella's being the principal aggressor, and also pitting the couple against the American racial/social ethos. There are also related conflicts: for example, that between Hattie and Ella; Joe and Jim; Ella and Mickey; and, of course, white versus black society, etc., but the white/black conflict is most compellingly conveyed in the interior lives of Ella and Jim and in the dynamics of their relationship. As Peter Gillett remarks, seconding the outlook of T.S. Eliot: "a critic who can see [. . .] only a universal drama of souls, or who can see the play only as a drama of marriage, is surely both white and half-blind" (63-64). Moreover, to the extent that the play addresses racial issues, O'Neill's depiction of black primitivism and cultural limitations, alleged as a criticism by Deborah Holton (38) and others, Chillun did elicit the praise of W.E.B. Dubois for its social analysis (Frank 84).

To put this another way, although O'Neill's criticism of America, including that of American racial conditions, is undeniable, the play is focused not on external clashes but on interiority, the psychological effects of the prevailing atmosphere and, particularly, on their manifestation as expressed within the characters and in the particularities of the Jim and Ella interactions. I use the word "particularities" advisedly because, although the characters may be said to represent white and black outlooks and feelings, they are not stick figures: Jim comes from a fairly well-to-do family; Ella is, at least initially, timid; the couple travels to and returns from France, and so on. These details are individualistic—idiosyncratic—as is the fabric of their relationship. To emphasize individual or peculiar traits, however, is not to deny that even the couple's interior drives (conflicts within themselves, with each other, and with the society) partake of the broader social/racial patterns that constitute the world of the play and inform the lives of the two principal characters.

Insofar, then, as the interior conflicts are emphasized in the play, the primary tragedy is psychological. Perhaps all tragic drama is ultimately psychological in orientation, albeit allied to spirituality, but whether true or not generally, that psychological emphasis in Chillun gives us ample reason to note the aesthetic centrality of the motif of ambivalence. Nowhere is that motif more effectively operative than in Ella. She loves Jim, who is kind to her, and she hates him for he is black, and her union with him threatens to undermine her sense of superiority. She wants him to pass his law exams, but fears his passing because success might cause him to leave her and, more importantly, might inculcate feelings of superiority in him and inferiority in her. She wants and tries to kill Jim though she is dependent upon him—even marries him primarily because he wishes to care for and protect her. She loves him, but will not bear his child for it might be black. She wishes, at the play's end, to play with him as an egalitarian child partner, yet she is also still drawn to having him adopt, albeit intermittently, the role of "old Uncle Jim" (315), her servant, so that she can maintain her social superiority.

Similarly, though not to the same extent, there is ambivalence in Jim, who wants to be Ella's man, her caretaker and protector, yet also wants to be her slave. He desires her physically, yet is willing to live with her as brother and sister; he so wishes to pass his law exam and thus prove himself to be as capable and accomplished as whites, the dominant cultural group, yet can accept his final failure on the exam, if that will somehow bring the couple together; indeed, he wishes to live, yet is ready to commit suicide, as he tells his sister Hattie, if that would endow Ella with health and longer life—yet he wouldn't want to die for she would have to contend with life without his protection when she is not strong enough to do so. As is clear, the motif of ambivalence is crucial to the psycho-social vision of O'Neill and to the play's theatricality conveyed powerfully in the chiaroscuro sets, the black/white behavioral distinctions, in the emotional shifts of the play's dialogue, in the monologues of Ella with the mask, and in Jim's manic self-address after he has learned, by letter, that he has failed the law entrance exam once again.

The principal aesthetic power of the motif of ambivalence derives, at base, from the conflict between an aggressive, egoistic, paternalistic, capitalistic, authoritarian, sexual, individualistic life orientation and a gentle, childlike, communal, harmonious, mystical maternal orientation. This essential conflict, operative from the play's inception, engenders the emotional rollercoaster that includes Ella's joyful response to his failure, Jim's anger, Jim's forgiveness, Ella's insults, Jim's forgiveness again, Ella's ironic forecast of her demise, Jim's vision of their togetherness, Ella's childhood dreams, and Jim's ecstatic incorporation of her dreams into his joyful religious illumination.

There are other dramatic foci and other motifs in Chillun, such as the disabling effects of poverty or the comparative warmth of European culture, but the play's psychological focus is primary, and the ambivalence motif is also primary, conceptually and technically, as is true of many O'Neill plays. This foundation is a substructure that links the earlier interpretive emphasis on miscegenation with the later biographical/critical thrust. The names "Jim" and "Ella" (the actual names of O'Neill's parents); the shifting love/hate feelings—pernicious destructive interactions; the caring husband/interfering wife syndrome, etc. all serve to encourage the reader/viewer to step back and to note the overall aesthetic design of the play's world, including the climactic conclusion. This foundational merging of the social protest and biographical strains also helps us to appreciate the play's significance for O'Neill personally and for the O'Neill canon.

Of the three terms, "making it," "madness," and "motherhood"—also the three principal movements in the play's overall structure—the first seems to apply exclusively to Jim, and the second seems to apply to Ella. The truth, however, is that, broadly regarded, Ella also partakes of the "making it" dimension; Jim, in a minor key, partakes of the "madness" concept; and the umbrella "motherhood" applies to both characters—especially to their union.

The Jim "making it" connection is obvious: he wants to be a lawyer. When Ella compassionately suggests that all the anguish of striving to become a lawyer may not be worth it, Jim says: "I need it more than anyone ever needed anything. I need it to live" (293). For Jim, becoming a lawyer means winning his way into the white world, winning the respect of Ella, perhaps also showing that a black man can be knowledgeable and bright. It means achieving the respect of his family and community. From Hattie's perspective, it means becoming a leader of his people and leading them to freedom and opportunity. It is understandable, therefore, that Hattie is appalled when Ella, upon returning to America, suggests that Jim will no longer be striving to pass the law examination. We might reasonably assume that Jim holds many of the same opinions as Hattie; however, he is more deeply committed to the welfare of Ella than to all else and would do absolutely nothing to harm or to separate himself from her.

Ella, too, wishes to "make it" out of the gutter that has been her life from the time she took up with Mickey. She wants happiness, a husband whom she can respect, economic wellbeing, and so on. In fact, she marries Jim, in part in order to achieve a peaceful and secure lifestyle. Of course, she lacks the drive of Jim or even Hattie, but "making it" is still a concept that appropriately applies to her. Parenthetically, when she is snubbed by Shorty because she has married a black man, she feels that she has been cast permanently off the path to "making it."

However peripheral Ella's connection is to the "making it" motif, she is the primary exponent of "madness" in the play. Throughout the play and with increasing intensity, Ella is deeply conflicted over her relationship with and marriage to Jim, who values her above all else on earth. This valuation by Jim is grounded partially in her being a white woman, partially because of personal characteristics, and partially because she is utterly dependent upon Jim. When they are teenagers, Ella is ambivalent about blacks. Later, before the couple marries, Ella indicates the operative racial hierarchy that informs her thinking. In complimenting Jim, she says, "You've been white to me Jim" (293). Later still, Mrs. Harris tells Hattie to go easy on Ella because it's "harder for de white dan for de black!" (298). The point is that, despite Jim's attractive qualities and his kindness to her, being yoked to a black man is a terrible threat to someone who has internalized the values of white superiority and deserved dominance. This conflicted attitude toward Jim informs Ella's character and causes her deterioration during the course of the play.

By the time she is back in the United States, she maniacally denies her connection to Jim, deprecates his intellectual gifts, disparages the achievements of his sister, and requires medical attention and, of course, the care of her husband. Driven over the edge by ongoing internalized racial discomfiture, and especially by the Congo mask and the fears of Jim's possible success, she takes to bed, loses weight, color, and energy, engages in mad anti-black ranting, and finds herself beset by racial nightmares. She also finds herself driven to attempt to frighten her husband, disrupt his study, and even, as mentioned, to try to kill him rather than to permit him to pass his examinations. She madly, joyfully receives the news of his final failure and regresses into a psychotic dream of regained childhood at play's end. It is actually her monologue addressed to the Congo mask and subsequent stabbing of that artifact through which she most graphically and theatrically conveys her crazed state.

Whereas Ella's madness is full-blown, Hattie tells Jim that the doctor thinks that he also is on the point of collapse and illness. Ella's behavior and his long, tense, frustrating quest to pass the law exam, made yet more stressful through his association of exam success with white culture, unnerve him terribly. His failure, therefore, coupled with Ella's obvious insanity, places Jim in an extraordinarily fragile psychological state. His instability is reflected in his near mad, lengthy outburst that parallels his paranoid revelation to Ella in act 1, scene 3 regarding his psychological disintegration when in the presence of whites at the law exam. Parenthetically, anyone who has critically questioned O'Neill's deftness and psychological acumen in presenting the dynamics of race in this play might do well to reconsider his brilliant exposition in those speeches. It is, however, the outburst of act 2, scene 3, a poetic, theatrical masterpiece, which shows Jim most memorably on the verge of madness. He has just learned that he has, once again, failed, and says to Ella, "looking at her wildly":

Pass? Pass? [. . .] Good Lord, child, how come you can ever imagine such a crazy idea? Pass? Me? Jim Crow Harris? Nigger Jim Harris—become a full-fledged member of the bar! Why, the mere notion of it is enough to kill you with laughing! It'd be against all natural laws, all human right and justice. It'd be miraculous, there'd be earthquakes and catastrophies, the Seven Plagues'd come again and locusts'd devour all the money in the banks, the second Flood'd come roaring and Noah's fall overboard, the sun'd drop out of the sky like a ripe fig, and the Devil'd perform miracles and God'd be tipped head first right out of the Judgment seat! (He laughs, maudlinly uproarious.) (313)

Madness, too, is allied to the final component of the noted triad under consideration, namely "motherhood." If anything, the concept of "motherhood," if correctly attributed to the final moments of action in All God's Chillun Got Wings and appropriately designated as the play's final movement, is biographically potent—readily attributable to O'Neill's life and other work. It is also grounded theoretically in the commentary of Carl Jung, who wrote:

The most immediate primordial image is the mother, for she is in every way the nearest and most powerful experience; and the one that occurs in the most impressionable period of a man's life [. . .] in the unconscious [. . .] the mother always remains a powerful primordial image, determining and colouring in the individual conscious life our relation to woman, to society, and to the world of feeling and fact, yet in so subtle a way that, as a rule, there is no conscious perception of the process. (34-35)

Many scholars, such as Stephen Black, have noted the confusion and angst engendered in O'Neill by the necessary withdrawal from him of his gentle, genteel, girlish mother (45-48). Metaphorically, in characterizing Jim, O'Neill might well have been thinking of himself (his consciousness, if not his actual demeanor) vis-à-vis the world in which his mother was unreachable. In act 1, scene 3, O'Neill describes Jim as follows: "He has grown into a quietly-dressed, studious looking Negro with an intelligent yet queerly-baffled, sensitive face" (292). This description is reminiscent of Edmund's bafflement as portrayed in Long Day's Journey into Night, a work with which, according to numerous scholars, such as Jean Chothia, Chillun shares various common elements (193).

One of the shared elements is the conclusion of both plays. In Journey, Mary ("staring dreamily [. . .]. Her face looks extraordinarily youthful and innocent") regresses to childhood: "I had a talk with mother Elizabeth. She is so sweet and good. A saint on earth. I love her dearly" (827). Essentially, the same pattern is evident at Chillun's conclusion, where a mad Ella entreats Jim to return with her to their childhood. Just as Mary's drug-induced vision involves a religious affirmation, so, too, Jim asks forgiveness of God for having blamed God for the tragic condition and the collapse of their lives. In a voice filled with awe, reminiscent of the Negro spiritual from which O'Neill drew his play's title, Jim says that he sees God's "Light again" and incorporates Ella's recollection of childhood into his vision: "Honey, Honey I'll play right up to the gates of Heaven with you." Ella, then, like a child playing with another child, "tugs at one of his hands, laughingly trying to pull him from his knees as The Curtain Falls" (315).

There are a few salient points to be made here. First, the return to childhood is part of a cyclical pattern: a harking back, in the last scene, to the first scene (a technical motif also operative in the "honey" speeches of scenes 4 and 3 of acts 1 and 2 respectively), such dramatic movement endowing the play with a circular structure. Quite simply, the pattern of circularity is traditionally reminiscent of harmony—Godhead—because God's immanence ontologically and within the world is without beginning or end. Moreover, circularity is associated with peace and joy, at least in the ring that accompanies vows in a wedding ceremony. In addition, we are reminded in this ending of Jim's hope, expressed at the conclusion of act 1, scene 3, that Europe will be different from America: "We'll go abroad where a man is a man—where it don't make that difference—where people are kind and wise to see the soul under skins" (294). The association of kindness and wisdom with God is traditional, and the mysticism and idealism of this early speech is also part and parcel of Jim's spiritual vision.

In embedding Ella's childlike wish of a return to childhood in his spiritual epiphany, a further connection is made with the earliest interactions between Jim and Ella and with the spirit of Mary Tyrone's final speech. That Jim Harris, throughout the play, is a nurturer and protector of Ella, especially at this climactic moment, makes him a paternal figure and, yet, paradoxically, a maternal figure as well. Ella's maternal need to care for another human being—"I've got to help someone" (294), as expressed in act 1, scene 3, is also evoked in this climax. As Jim says: "Let this fire of burning suffering purify me of selfishness and make me worthy of the child You send me for the woman You take away!" (315). Like Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten, who becomes a mother instead of the lover she had initially wished to be, so Jim Harris does the same.

Joe Weixlmann, in an article entitled "Stage Segregation: Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie and O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings," contends that the ending is inappropriate, unmotivated, and so forth (36), but this judgment is not correct. This judgment is surely a misjudgment. O'Neill's ending follows directly from the body of the play: the hopes and dreams of the couple followed by their disillusionment. Vulnerable and helpless, this couple is in need of ultimate understanding and peace. The couple needs to belong—a recurrent O'Neill trope—to be protected; to find a haven; perhaps to find heaven, and that is precisely the vista that this mystical, ecstatic conclusion offers.

Other scholars, such as Bogard, Gillett, and Engel, come nearer the mark by seeing the pattern of ecstatic illumination quite clearly. These scholars, however, qualify in various ways their acceptance of O'Neill's religious vision. For example, Engel writes of the irony of the situation, "the implication that madness is a qualification for admission to heaven" (126). While clever, this outlook seems to miss the intention of O'Neill. To O'Neill, the madness depicted at Chillun's conclusion is not ironic, but an outgrowth of and an answer—parenthetically, a decidedly personal O'Neillian answer—to the plight of these two lost, confused, tortured adult children caught in the maelstrom of living. Their holy madness, allied to the innocence, the trust, and the joy of childhood, spirits them to a place of welcome, of belonging, of maternal warmth—beyond the confines of this earth.

The three noted and notable aesthetic components ("Making it," "Madness," and "Motherhood") can now be seen to be the essential supports and significant segments of this play. Here, and this is part of what makes Chillun so fascinating, they are put forth in a pure, transparent, unadulterated form, making Chillun thoroughly accessible despite its complexity. Functioning in this way, they are windows and vantage points for comparison with O'Neill's other works, which possess the same triad but often in less precisely articulated and distilled fashion. Furthermore, embedded in this structural and ideational triad is a movement from the reductively paternal (suggestive of materialism, capitalism, aggressive sexuality, authoritarianism, and racial intolerance, etc.) to the all-encompassing, welcoming maternal ethos (characterized by and related to love, childhood, community, spring, sunshine, singing, etc.). This integrated quality in Chillun enriches the play and makes it a valuable tool for the study of the entire O'Neill canon. All O'Neill plays embody characters' efforts to spring free of the shackles of paternal control in order to merge themselves with maternal peace and security.

When I undertook this reconsideration of Chillun, a process of direct engagement with the play and a careful look at the scholarly response to it, it was, for me, an essentially cerebral, objective, analytic process to be applied to an older, lesser O'Neill work. Douglass Watt, for example, reflecting the views of many others, calls Chillun "clumsy in speech [. . .] dead [. . .] minor" in reviewing—actually panning—its 1975 revival production by George C. Scott (72-3). After having spent considerable time rereading the play, however, considering and/or reconsidering the outlooks of many critics and scholars and formulating my own exegesis, I have developed a newfound respect for the play. In effect, I am beginning to think that the play is, in a way, a masterpiece—among O'Neill's best. Because of the purity of its vision and form, it enables us to appreciate the parallel, tripartite, quintessentially O'Neillian deep structures of The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Fountain, Desire Under the Elms, and a host of other O'Neill plays. It possesses unrelenting emotional intensity, theatrical novelty and power, compellingly emotional conclusions to scenes, insightful psycho/social analysis of racial issues as applied to individuals and groups, a suspenseful plot, clearly and perceptively drawn characters, forceful and often nuanced dialogue, and a tragic vision that links the play to other works within the O'Neill canon.

That vision is of people living in a world of dreams on this earth—trying to "make it," finding it impossible to do so, and being briefly driven, as a result, tragically to or toward "madness." Yet, they move ultimately—transcendently—to a condition of maternal protection beyond this earth (where all the bleakness is lost and heaven is found). Making this triadic aesthetic journey, a wish-fulfilling dream for the tortured playwright himself, was O'Neill's mysterious "intention" in writing All God's Chillun Got Wings.

WORKS CITED

Black, Stephen A. Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: the Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Chothia, Jean. "Trying to Write the Family Play: Autobiography and the Dramatic Imagination." The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Michael Manheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 192-205.

Engel, Edwin A. The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.

Frank, Glenda. "Tempest in Black and White: the 1924 Premier of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings." Resources For American Literary Study. 26.1 (2000): 75-89.

Gelb, Arthur and Barbara. O'Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Gillett, Peter. "O'Neill and Racial Myths." The Critical Response to Eugene O'Neill. Ed. John H. Houchin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Jung, Carl. Civilization in Transition. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. 2nd ed. Vol. 10. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

O'Neill, Eugene. All God's Chillun Got Wings. Collected Plays 1920-1931. Ed. Travis Bogard. Vol. 2. New York: Library of America, 1988. 277-315.

_____. Long Day's Journey into Night. Collected Plays 1932-1943. Ed. Travis Bogard. Vol. 3. New York: Library of America, 1988. 713-851.

Watt, Douglas. "O'Neill Rarity in Weak Revival." The Critical Response to Eugene O'Neill. Ed. John H. Houchin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Weixlmann, Joe. "Staged Segregation: Balwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie and O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings." Black American Literature Forum.11.1 (Spring 1977): 35-36.