The "Ice Man" was written in 1939 - a very bitter time for O'Neill. The storm of war that loomed on the horizon had deeply unsettled him.

Later, in a public confession (1956), he said: "The war made me realize that I was relying on my faith in old values - and those had disappeared... It's very sad, but today there are no longer values to support life...".

This unrest is mirrored in "The Ice Man" - this "imposing structure raised by Giant Despair," as John Gassner called it. In writing it, O'Neill renounced the formal experiments that had once so fascinated him - from the expressionism of "The Emperor Jones" to the masks of "The Great God Brown" and to the Freudian Oresteia "Mourning Becomes Electra".

He returned to the realism of his early works, and revisited the mine of his memories, almost thirty years back - when, as a young sailor and "adventurer," he frequented the bars of Downtown, the working-class neighborhoods of New York City.