“Your point that no critical analyst has dealt sufficiently with the Irish aspects of Joyce is certainly true. They seem to understand so little of Irish history, political and religious—little of the Irish past in Joyce. They do not see how distinctively Irish the pride of Stephen Dedalus is—and how old it is. And so they cannot feel the depth of Irish tragedy in the dying mother—Stephen’s pride drama. They examine it as if it were a scene from Ibsen or Strindberg illuminated by Freud.
     Speaking of the Irish past, I want to recommend a book published in the U.S. some six months ago, The Great O’Neill by Sean O’Faoláin. If you haven’t already read it, you will find it worth your while. It is a biography of Hugh O’Neill but also a study of Irish history in Elizabethan times. I learned from it a lot of the Irish past I had mislearned before. You know what most Irish histories are like—benign Catholic benediction-and-blather tracts, or blind jingo glorifications of peerless fighting heroes, in the old bardic fashion. Hugh O’Neill, as O’Faoláin portrays him in the light of historical fact, is no pure and pious archangel of Erin, but a fascinatingly complicated character, strong proud and noble, ignoble shameless and base, loyal and treacherous, a cunning politician, a courageous soldier, an inspiring leader—but at times so weakly neurotic he could burst openly into tears (even when sober!) and whine pitiably that no one understood him. In short, Shakespeare might have written a play about him. He was worth it—one of the most interesting men of his time, and one of the most intelligent and successful of all the Elizabethan age power-grabbers.”
—Letter to the Irish-American fiction writer James T. Farrell (7/28/1943)

“All I’ve done since Pearl Harbor is to rewrite one of the plays in my Cycle. A Touch of the Poet—(an Irish play, incidentally, although located in New England in 1828)…I have also (in the past two years) written a non-Cycle play entitled A Moon for the Misbegotten. In this too, the important characters are Irish, although it is less remote in time (1923) than the Cycle play…You would like The Iceman Cometh, I know. It was written after I stopped going on with the Cycle in ‘39 and is one of the best things I have ever done. And the play I wrote immediately after it, (in 1940) Long Day’s Journey into Night, is the best. No one, except Carlotta, has read this play yet. I have a strong feeling against letting anyone see it now. For that matter, no one has seen the two Irish plays I’ve mentioned.”
     —Letter to Sean O’Casey (8/5/1943)

—Letter to his son Eugene O’Neill, Jr. (5/7/1945)

“One thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish. And, strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked.”
     —(11/1946) Quoted in Bowen, Croswell. “The Black Irishman.” In ed.s. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher. O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press, 1961: 65.