His book on the life of Eugene O'Neill is the first psychoanalytic biography of the great American playwright. Black won a prestigious Killam fellowship to complete work on the book, due to be released in 1995. He claims that the central events in O'Neill's adult life were the deaths of his father, mother and brother, all within a three-year period. "The deaths gave his plays a deeper sense of the tragic," according to Black of SFU. "He worked out his mourning in his plays." [BCBW 1995]