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Eclipse of Action takes up the long-standing claim that tragic drama and modern society are somehow inimical. It proposes that tragedy does indeed face new, if not quite disabling, challenges in the modern era, and that these arise from an unexpected quarter: the birth of political economy in the eighteenth century. Classical philosophers such as Aristotle had argued that human happiness or unhappiness results from our actions in the ethical and political spheres. Accordingly, Aristotle also designated action as the source of tragedy’s ethical significance and artistic perfection. Adam’s Smith’s The Wealth of Nations overturned Aristotelian ethics by introducing a new kind of happiness that pertained to the public as a whole rather than to individuals, and that was achieved not through action but through economic production. But by toppling action from its place at the summit of human endeavor, Smith also, if only incidentally, posed problems for tragedy. Modern economic thought, and the capitalist economy it attempts to understand, trigger a crisis of action that is also a potential crisis for tragic drama and for theater more generally. But in so doing, it simply brings to the fore a conflict between action and production that had been brewing since the time of the Greeks. Eclipse of Action explores this conflict in the work of playwrights from Aeschylus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton to Beckett, Arthur Miller, and Sarah Kane, and in philosophers and theorists from Aristotle to Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Kojève, and Bataille.

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O'Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. This biography both traces O'Neill's tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works. The book paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwright's life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see O'Neill as a young Greenwich Village radical, a ravenous autodidact who attempted to understand the disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that he knew was simmering beneath. According to the book, O'Neill mined this disjunction like no other American writer. His characters burn with longing for an idealized future composed of equal parts material success and individual freedom, but repeatedly they fall back to earth, pulled by the tendrils of family and the insatiability of desire. Drawing on thinkers from Emerson to Nietzsche, O'Neill viewed this endlessly frustrated desire as the problematic core of American democracy, simultaneously driving and undermining American ideals of progress, success, and individual freedom.