Author, playwright and journalist Barbara Gelb, "who, with her husband, Arthur Gelb, produced the first full-scale biography of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, then followed it decades later with two volumes that reconsidered his life," has died, the New York Times reported. She was 91. The Gelbs published their original biography, O'Neill, in 1962 and it became a bestseller. Decades later, when they were in their 70s, they "undertook two new volumes that clarified some psychological mysteries, dealt more charitably with O'Neill's parents and judged O'Neill's drinking and other self-destructive excesses more harshly," the Times noted.
O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo was released in 2000, and they had written almost all of a second volume, By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill, when Arthur Gelb died in 2014. Barbara Gelb completed the book, which was released in 2016. Her other books include So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed & Louise Bryant; Varnished Brass: The Decade After Serpico; and On the Track of Murder.