Mourning Becomes Electra

About this book

A three-part reworking of themes from Greek tragedy, the plays are set in New England in 1865, just after the Civil War. A returning victor, General Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon), is poisoned by his unfaithful wife Christine (Clytemnestra) and then avenged by his son Orin (Orestes) and daughter (Lavinia). With Orin's subsequent suicide, Lavinia (the Electra of the title) becomes a fatalistic recluse in the Mannon mansion. The author was four times a Pulitzer Prize winner and was the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.