He was a famed playwright and his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1957), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933) and The Iceman Cometh (1946).
Born on October 16, 1888, in a New York
City hotel room, writer Eugene Gladstone O'Neill is one of the most admired
playwrights of all time. His talent for poignant and piercing dramas sprang
from a life marked by challenges. He was the son of Mary Ellen "Ella"
and James O'Neill, a stage actor.
After O'Neill was born, his mother
developed an addiction to morphine. She had been given the drug to help her
through her particularly difficult childbirth. Ella was also still grieving for
O'Neill's older brother, Edmund, who had died of the measles three years
earlier. (The couple also had another son, James Jr.) His father continued on
with his role in a touring production of The Count of Monte Cristo shortly
after O'Neill's birth.
O'Neill spent much of his early life on the
road with his father. Shortly before his 7th birthday, however, he was sent
away to boarding school; O'Neill spent years at the St. Aloysius Academy for
Boys, where he received a strict Catholic upbringing. In 1900, he returned to
New York City, where he attended the De La Salle Institute for two years. He
then went to Betts Academy, a prep school in Stamford, Connecticut. In 1906,
O'Neill enrolled at Princeton University, but his heart wasn't in his studies, and
he was either dismissed for missing too many classes or left after only 10
months at the school.
Career Beginnings
After leaving Princeton, O'Neill floundered
for a time. He took several sea voyages, ran around town with brother James and
indulged heavily in alcohol. He had a brief marriage to Kathleen Jenkins, which
resulted in one son, Eugene O'Neill Jr.
In 1912, O'Neill battled tuberculosis.
While recuperating from his illness, he found his calling as a playwright,
finding inspiration from such European dramatists as August Strindberg and
later enrolling in a writing class at Harvard University. O'Neill had his first
play produced in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1916: Bound East for Cardiff,
a one-act play that was staged in New York later that year.
Also in 1916, O'Neill made a second attempt
at domestic bliss. He married fellow writer Agnes Boulton, and the couple
eventually had two children together, son Shane and daughter Oona. O'Neill took
the theatrical world by storm in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon, which won a
Pulitzer Prize. Later that year, another O'Neill masterpiece, The Emperor
Jones, made its Broadway debut.
Leading Playwright
In 1922, O'Neill brought his drama Anna
Christie to the Broadway stage; this tale of a prostitute's return home netted
the playwright his second Pulitzer Prize. O'Neill suffered a personal loss with
the death of his brother the following year. By this time, the playwright had
also lost both of his parents. But O'Neill's private struggles seemed to aid
him in creating greater dramatic works for the stage, including Desire Under
the Elms (1924) and Strange Interlude (1928).
Around this time, O'Neill left his second
wife and quickly began a relationship with Carlotta Monterey, whom he married
in 1929.
O'Neill re-imagined the mythic tragedy Oresteia in
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), exchanging
ancient Greece for New England in the 19th century. Five years later, he became
the first American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was
given this honour "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his
dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy," according to
the Nobel Prize website.
Later Years
O'Neill completed Long Day's Journey Into
Night in the early 1940s, but he refused to have this autobiographical play
produced until long after his death. Around this same time, he had a falling
out with daughter Oona; he chose to end his relationship with Oona after she
married actor Charlie Chaplin.
After several years' absence from the
stage, in 1946, O'Neill returned with one of his most heralded works, The
Iceman Cometh, a dark drama that explores the lives of a group of barflies. The
following year, the playwright learned that he had Parkinson's disease, and
found it impossible to write due to the tremors in his hands.
In 1948, O'Neill, never a supportive
parent, cut ties with his youngest son, Shane, after Shane was arrested for
drug possession. Two years later, his eldest son, Eugene, committed suicide.
O'Neill died of bronchial pneumonia on
November 27, 1953, at the age of 65, in Boston, Massachusetts, leaving behind a
tremendous literary legacy of more than 50 plays. In 1957, Long Day's Journey
Into Night was performed on Broadway to rave reviews; O'Neill received a
posthumous Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for the drama. His work continues to
move and fascinate audiences today.
Biography sourced from Biography.com.
https://www.biography.com/writer/eugene-oneill
Play's included in this blog.
- Long Day's Journey Into Night
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