"O'Neill was the first American playwright of international reputation and remains unmatched to this day for the tragic intensity and exploratory range of his dramas. He would earn three of his four Pulitzer Prizes during their married years, beginning with Beyond the Horizon, a play he dedicated to Agnes. Boulton was a pulp-story writer, attuned to the marketplace for cheap romance in such magazines as Breezy Stories and Live Stories: A Magazine of Vitalized Fiction. Under his influence, she tried to set a higher standard for her writing, without much success, while ironically his plays, which steered away from popular "show shop" trends, went on to earn a sizable fortune. The maintenance of their increasingly lavish homes and the rearing of their two children, Shane and Oona, fell to her, while he retreated into Art.". "William Davies King's introduction puts the correspondence into the context of O'Neill's rapidly evolving career, while also introducing Boulton as a figure of interest in her own right. He analyzes the problem of "reading" a marriage by means of the documents it generates. The result is a book that will interest not just students of O'Neill and theater historians, or those interested in women's history and the social and cultural climate of the 1920s, but also anyone who wants to ponder the shifting terms of marriage."--BOOK JACKET.

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