The author of the most important biography of Eugene O'Neill, Louis Sheaffer was born Louis Sheaffer Slung on 18 October 1912 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Abraham and Ida Jacobson Slung. His formal education ceased in 1931 after one year at the University of North Carolina. In 1934 he became a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle in Brooklyn, New York. After serving in the army from 1942 to 1946 he returned to the Eagle as a columnist. In 1947 he became the paper's Film critic, and in 1949 its theater critic. When the Brooklyn Eagle ceased publication in 1955, Sheaffer became the theatrical press agent for the Circle in the Square Theater in New York City; he served in that capacity into 1956. During this period Jose Quintero directed productions of The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) which set the seal on O'Neill's reputation as the great tragic dramatist of the American stage. Sheaffer lists his...