William Davies King

William Davies King (born 1955) is an American theater historian, author, and collage artist. He is distinguished professor emeritus of theater and dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he taught from 1987 until his retirement in 2025.

King is best known as a scholar of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. He prepared critical editions of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (2014) and The Iceman Cometh (2020) for Yale University Press and edited the correspondence of O'Neill and his second wife, Agnes Boulton. He also wrote studies of O'Neill's marriages and late plays. His earlier work includes Henry Irving's "Waterloo" (1993), a study of late-Victorian English theater. In 1997, he wrote Writing Wrongs, a book-length study of the playwright Wallace Shawn. A multimedia edition of Long Day's Journey into Night that King edited received the 2017 PROSE Award in Literature.

King is also known for his memoir Collections of Nothing (2008) and for an altered-book art practice he calls "bibliolage" or "hyper-illuminated books," which has been shown in exhibitions in Santa Barbara County, New Orleans, and Montreal.

Early life and education King was raised in Canton, Ohio, and attended Phillips Academy in Andover. He encountered O'Neill's work as a teenager. He graduated from Yale College in 1977 and earned an MFA in 1981 and DFA in 1983 from the Yale School of Drama. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1987 and was later appointed distinguished professor of theater and dance.

His first book, Henry Irving's "Waterloo" was published in 1993. It examined the conflict in late-Victorian English theater between actor-centered and playwright-centered drama. The book focused on the actor Henry Irving's production of Arthur Conan Doyle's play Waterloo and George Bernard Shaw's attack on it in the Saturday Review. In the Victorian Review, Barry O'Connor wrote that the book advanced a neo-historical methodology offering new directions for theater historians, and praised King's writing as comprehensible and free of jargon. Reviewing the book in Victorian Studies, Robertson Davies found that King presented the Shaw–Irving conflict in detail and with a generally fair hand. He welcomed the book as a contribution to the continuing dispute between playwrights' theatre and actors' theater, while cautioning that it should not be regarded as the final word. He also added that King at times overlooked the practical realities of the working theater. The book received the Joe A. Callaway Prize for best book on theater in 1994.

His second book, Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn was published in 1997, with a foreword by John Lahr. The book was a critical study of the plays, screenplays, and acting career of Wallace Shawn. Reviewing it in Theatre Journal, Beth Schachter praised the book as an excellent study that showed why Shawn's demanding theater merited book-length treatment. However, she found his comparisons between Shawn and Eugene O'Neill of limited value and suggested that King's argument for the radical character of Shawn's plays would have been strengthened by comparison with contemporary playwrights such as Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés.

Eugene O'Neill scholarship Much of King's scholarship concerns Eugene O'Neill and the influence of O'Neill's second and third wives on his work. He edited A Wind Is Rising: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O'Neill, a collection of the letters exchanged between O'Neill and Agnes Boulton during their marriage. Reviewing it in The Review of English Studies, Gavin Cologne-Brookes wrote that the correspondence shed new light on a key period of O'Neill's life. He credited King's commentary with showing how the couple were acting out parts in their own domestic drama on some level. In The Modern Language Review, Steven Price praised King's introduction as full and revealing, but argued that King gave too much value to what were often little more than hastily constructed notes. He concluded that the volume would appeal mostly to readers seeking every scrap of material about O'Neill.

In the monograph Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O'Neill and Agnes Boulton King examined the marriage of O'Neill and Boulton. He read the couple's writings for traces of their relationship and argued that Boulton was an essential presence throughout O'Neill's writing career rather than merely a transitional figure between his early life and his later marriage to Carlotta Monterey. Reviewing it in Modern Drama, Tamsen Wolff described the book as the first considered account of the O'Neill–Boulton marriage. She praised King's reclamation of Boulton as a writer in her own right. However, she found the connections King drew between the couple's lives and their literary work often tenuous, and questioned whether establishing such links was ultimately useful for understanding the plays. Writing in the Eugene O'Neill Review, Kurt Eisen called the book a thoroughly researched and sensitive account. He credited King with challenging the prevailing view that Carlotta was the dominant influence on O'Neill's work. King also edited a new edition of Boulton's memoir Part of a Long Story: Eugene O'Neill as a Young Man in Love (McFarland, 2011). It restored passages cut from the 1958 original and added explanatory notes.

King edited a critical edition of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (2014). Reviewing it in the Eugene O'Neill Review, Zander Brietzke questioned at the outset whether another edition of such a frequently reprinted play was needed. However, he concluded that the volume's value lay in King's supporting apparatus, including an annotated bibliography, notes on the play's literary allusions, an essay on historical and critical perspectives, and a discussion of the 2002 Goodman Theatre production directed by Robert Falls. He also edited a critical edition of The Iceman Cometh, adding textual notes, a glossary, character studies, production history, and an essay on the play's historical and critical context. Reviewing it in the Eugene O'Neill Review, Robert Baker-White wrote that the edition guided the reader through the complexity of O'Neill's text in masterful fashion. She further credited King with resisting the temptation to tie the play too closely to O'Neill's own biography. The book was also reviewed by Katie Johnson in the Eugene O'Neill Review, who called it a major scholarly contribution to United States drama and history.

King was editor of the Eugene O'Neill Review for six years during the 2010s. He was a Travis Bogard Artist in Residence at Tao House in 2018. He has worked as dramaturg on O'Neill productions, including a staging of Long Day's Journey into Night at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. His play Into Night: A Day at Tao House, which dramatizes the writing of Long Day's Journey, received staged readings at the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site and at the International Conference of the Eugene O'Neill Society in Boston in 2022. His 2008 memoir Collections of Nothing combined an account of his collections with a reflection on the psychology of collecting. In Ploughshares, the book was described as a memoir of unexpected beauty rooted in honest emotional self-examination. Writing for PopMatters, David Banash described the book as drawing the reader into the ordinary objects of everyday life. In The New York Times Book Review, Henry Alford called the book, "a wonderfully frank and engaging look at one man's detritus-fueled pathology," and wrote that "King’s honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him."

In June 2019, King presented Tree of Life: A Performance Event at UC Santa Barbara. In the display, he arranged his cereal box collection on a dance studio floor as a mandala in the shape of a tree. Earlier, from 2020 to 2022, the UCSB Library hosted The Creative Edge of Collecting, an exhibition of his collections. His works were featured in an exhibition at the Kolaj Fest in New Orleans in 2019 Montreal in 2025, and in the catalogue: Cultural Deconstructions: Critical Issues in Collage.

His book art has been shown in group exhibitions in Santa Barbara County, including ReOpening The Book at the Elverhøj Museum of History and Art in Solvang, California in 2018, where he gave an artist presentation, and Cut and Paste: Collage in Santa Barbara at the Arts Fund Gallery later that year. Reviewing his work for the Santa Barbara News-Press, the art critic Josef Woodard characterized King as a "shamelessly entertaining book vandal with a cause," describing how King pastes mythic, religious, and art-historical imagery into existing books, reconstituting rather than defacing them.

Selected works