Travis Bogard; Leading Scholar on Eugene O’Neill’s Life, Works

Travis Bogard, one of the foremost experts on the life and works of playwright Eugene O’Neill, has died at age 79.

Bogard, who died Saturday of a stroke, was a longtime professor emeritus of dramatic art at UC Berkeley.

In addition to writing and teaching about O’Neill, Bogard also helped preserve O’Neill’s former home in Danville, Calif., as a site for the performing arts.

At the home, which the O’Neills dubbed Tao House, O’Neill wrote the plays “The Iceman Cometh,” “Hughie,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“In the 30 years of his creative life,” Bogard told a Times reporter touring the premises in 1985, “O’Neill completed the drafts of 62 plays. Eleven were destroyed, and of those remaining over half contain discernible autobiographical elements.”

The site is now a 13-acre historic area maintained by the National Park Service.

A native of San Francisco, Bogard was educated at UC Berkeley and Princeton University and served in the Army during World War II.

Bogard began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1948 and later developed Berkeley’s first doctoral program in dramatic art. He retired in 1987.

Among his many articles and books on O’Neill are “Contour in Time, the Plays of Eugene O’Neill” and “The Complete Plays of Eugene O’Neill,” recognized as the authoritative collection of the playwright’s works. With Jackson R. Byer, Bogard also edited “Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill,” which was viewed as being akin to an autobiography by the playwright, who died in 1953.

Bogard also contributed a critically praised commentary on O’Neill in an innovative recording of his play “The Emperor Jones,” made by the Bay Area Radio Drama in San Francisco in 1991. Bogard noted that the 1920 play was the first major role ever written for a black actor.

Bogard’s wife, Jane, died in 1988. He is survived by a son, a daughter and a grandson.