Local author Michael Tubridy presents Champion of the Misbegotten: The Irish Influence in the Life and Plays of Eugene O’Neill.

O’Neill remains the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and the only one to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times. Beginning in the 1920s, in masterpieces such as The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he dealt with subjects that hardly anybody dared to touch previously on Broadway, including race relations, Freudianism, labor strife, and drug and alcohol addiction, forging a path that subsequent playwrights would follow in pushing against the boundaries of commercial theater.

Tubridy will explain how Irish or Irish-American influences figure in O’Neill’s family; in friends who inspired many of his characters; in the Roman Catholicism he argued endlessly with; and in the anguished Irish-American adaptation to this country.

A lifelong resident of Englewood, Tubridy frequently writes about Irish and Irish American history in his blog “A Boat Against the Current.” He has also lectured in Bergen County on such literary and entertainment figures as Grace Kelly, film directors John Ford and John Huston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and Lady Augusta Gregory of the Irish Literary Renaissance.

Copies of his biography (co-written with Rob Polner) of the Irish-born New York attorney, politician, and activist Paul O’Dwyer, “An Irish Passion for Justice,” will also be available for signing and purchase.