The Iceman Cometh was published by Random House in 1946 and premiered on Broadway that October. It is the longest of O’Neill’s plays (approximately four and a half hours in performance) and among the most demanding — a cast of eighteen characters in a single set, with monologue after monologue.
Harry Hope’s saloon is a flophouse on the West Side of Manhattan. Its residents are alcoholics and derelicts who survive on “pipe dreams” — the bartender who’ll go back to his profession tomorrow, the law student who’ll pass the bar, the Boer War veteran who’ll return to his regiment, the anarchist who’ll rejoin the movement. They never do. Tomorrow never comes. And they are, in their fashion, content.
Theodore Hickman (“Hickey”), a hardware salesman, arrives for his annual drinking visit — but this time he’s sober. He’s come to free his friends from their pipe dreams: to force them to confront the truth about themselves. One by one, he pushes them to test their illusions. They try — and are destroyed. Without their lies, they cannot function.
The play’s devastating final act reveals why Hickey has changed: he murdered his wife Evelyn, who forgave him everything — his affairs, his drinking, his failures — and whose unconditional love he experienced as an unbearable judgment. He killed her to escape the pipe dream of her faith in him.
Collecting The Iceman Cometh
First edition (Random House, New York, 1946): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $200–$500
- Very good in jacket: $80–$200
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation.
Harry Hope’s Saloon
The Iceman Cometh (completed 1939, first produced 1946) is O’Neill’s bleakest and most powerful play after Long Day’s Journey. Set in Harry Hope’s waterfront saloon in 1912, it follows a group of alcoholic derelicts who sustain themselves on “pipe dreams” — fantasies about tomorrow that excuse today’s paralysis. The arrival of traveling salesman Hickey, who has found a disturbing kind of peace by confronting reality, strips the men of their illusions with devastating consequences. The play runs nearly five hours in uncut performance and requires an extraordinary ensemble. Jason Robards’s 1956 revival at Circle in the Square made the play’s reputation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is this play so long? O’Neill deliberately made it exhausting — the repetition of the characters’ pipe dreams, their resistance and collapse, mirrors the circular, numbing quality of alcoholic existence. The length is essential to the play’s hypnotic power.