The Night Crawlers

I’m always somewhat surprised to discover how many of the writers and thinkers I’ve admired over the years grew up reading Eugene O’Neill with a passion equal to my own. For years, I thought of O’Neill, who spoke so deeply to my adolescent self, as a kind of private pleasure. So I experienced something of a jolt when, in 2006, Joan Didion told me, during an interview, that as a girl she’d read all O’Neill’s works in one summer, captivated by his theatricality. Mike Nichols, in a 2016 PBS “American Masters” program, described how much O’Neill meant to him, too. What impressed me, as I watched Didion’s and Nichols’s eyes light up at