Introduction The current essay deals with an analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s play named desire under the Elms, which is the classic of modern American drama. The research purposes we pose are not about revealing plays structure or its comprehensive description. Instead, this argumentative essay seeks to outline the contours of the main theme that can be found in Desire under the Elms and reveal relations between characters, their viewpoints, and cognitive perceptions, which in their turn constitute the theme realization. The main theme analyzed in this argumentative essay is selfishness, hate, and envy sandwiched between lust for money and land, which eventually leads to deprivation and tragedy since all material values are pursued in an immoral manner. After the main elements of this theme are revealed, we discuss the farmhouse as an important setting in the play where all major events unfold. Finally, the integration of this setting with a central idea is made, describing how it provides expressive means for depicting selfishness, hate, and lust in O’Neill’s play. Selfishness, hate, lust for money, and land in Desire under the Elms. Besides all differences between the three sons of Ephraim Cabot, the owner of a large and prosperous farm in New England, they have much in common, and this is hatred, resentment, and envy for their father and their desire (the notion of desire means something malicious in O’Neill play) to be owners of Cabot’s farm. They lost their mother in early childhood and were raised in patriarchic traditions, beaten and oppressed by him. They saw how greedy he was for money, how he spent his ‘blood and sweat’ (in his own words) to earn money, to capitalize on his farm and land. This situation resembles the plot of Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers, where Karamazov-father was also a greedy voluptuous man who spent his wealth only for indulging himself and didn’t give money to his sons, which made them hate him. So Cabot was very greedy, and though he understood that he is old, he still made everything he could to harm his children. ‘Stingy night,’ he was one can claim. For Cabot, hardness and strictness are real virtues, but he uses them only in relation to his sons. Amusement and indulging, he leaves for himself. Of course, all this can’t help but produce such feelings as selfishness and especially envy in his sons that grew narrow-minded, stupid, having only money in their mind and secretly hating each other. Ephraim, though, knows that his sons are envious of him and hate him, and he seems to know the reason. As he tells Abbie later in the play: ‘They hated me ’cause I was hard. I hated them ’cause they were soft’. In fact, Cabot here seems to misinterpret the main reasons for hate. He is unconscious about money and land, and material orientations are the main reasons for envy and hatred. His own Desires became the Desires of his sons. Thus he can be claimed responsible for their attitude to him. But the most selfish of all sons are undoubtedly Eben, around whom the main dramatics of the novel is mainly organized. His main desire is to possess the farmhouse, which is due to his lust for money and selfishness. He even pays money for his brothers so they would not contest his right on the farmhouse. Simeon and Peter then depart to the West (California)