Barbara Gelb is a writer and editor who is best known for her collaboration with her husband Arthur Gelb on a definitive biography of Eugene O'Neill.

Arthur and Barbara Gelb are best known for O'Neill (1962), their biography of Eugene O'Neill. Although the Gelbs are not academic critics, and although their book defies the ideology of the New Criticism, which demands that writers' works be analyzed with little consideration of their lives, O'Neill is widely considered the most complete biography of the playwright to date and remains a standard reference for O'Neill scholars of all critical persuasions. It is particularly valued for its thoroughness and for the compelling documentation it provides to substantiate the contention that O'Neill included autobiographical elements in everything he wrote.

Arthur Gelb was born in New York on 3 February 1924 to Daniel and Fanny Gelb. He began his lifelong association with the New York Times as...