Eugene O'Neill

Sharing a birthday with Oscar Wilde is Eugene O'Neill.  Born in a hotel room overlooking Broadway on October 16, 1888, O'Neill's father, James, was one of the 19th century theater's most famous and respected actors.  The son was raised a Roman Catholic on trains and in hotel rooms, following his father across the country as he toured. 

In 1895, O'Neill entered the St. Aloysius Academy for Boys and transferred in 1900 to the DeLa Salle Institute in Manhattan.  His mother, Ella, was addicted to morphine and had little influence on her son except to cause him severe emotional pain.  In 1902,  she attempted suicide.  After renouncing Catholicism in 1902, O'Neill entered the Betts Academy in Stamford, an exclusive non-sectarian preparatory school.

After six years, O'Neill enrolled in Princeton University, but his failure to take his studies seriously resulted in his expulsion after the first year.  He spent most of his days in waterfront bars and brothels.  He took a series of odd jobs before finally deciding to set off on a gold prospecting expedition in Honduras, where he struck malaria.  After his recovery, he tried his hand at sailing, writing for a small-town newspaper, and acting in vaudeville, none very successfully. 

O'Neill married Kathleen Jenkins in 1909, and they had a son together.  But O'Neill's drinking proved a detriment to the couple, and they divorced within three years.  In 1912, O'Neill fell sick again, this time with tuberculosis.  He spent six months in a sanatorium.  While he was there, he began reading classic literature, including the modern plays of innovative playwrights Ibsen and Strindberg.

Upon his release, O'Neill set about writing his own plays.  He enrolled in George Pierce Baker's 47A Workshop at Harvard University from 1914-1915 and, within quick succession, completed eleven one-act scripts.  In 1916, he became part of a theatrical group in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  It was a marriage made in heaven.  The group, which would become known as the Provincetown Players and included writers Susan Glaspell and Robert Edmond Jones, began producing O'Neill's plays as quickly as he could turn them out.  In the process, they revolutionized the American theater.

O'Neill married Agnes Boulton in 1919, and during the course of their 11-year relationship, the couple produced two children.  He married Carlotta Monterey the same year of his divorce from Boulton.  The couple lived at first in France, and then in Georgia, and finally in California.  O'Neill was never close to his children.  He disowned his son, Shane, for a lifestyle of which he didn't approve, and he disavowed his daughter, Oona, after at the age of 18 she married Charlie Chaplin.

Despite a chaotic personal life--or perhaps because of it--O'Neill was literally never at a loss for words.  As he grew older, his work got better.  His early Realist period had him writing about his own experiences, most often as a sailor.  In the 1920s, he rejected realism in favor of his Expressionistic period, in which he attempted to capture on stage the forces behind human life.  He was influenced mostly during this period by the ideas of philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche, psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg.  During his final period, O'Neill returned to realism, and today his later works are most often considered his best.

In 1920, O'Neill's play, Beyond the Horizon, became a popular and critical success on Broadway, winning for its author the Pulitzer Prize.  O'Neill would go on to win two more Pulitzers in the next eight years, one for Anna Christie (1922) and another for Strange Interlude (1928). 

His best known plays are Anna Christine (pub. 1922), Desire Under the Elms (pub.1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (pub. 1931), Long Day's Journey into Night (pub. 1956), and The Iceman Cometh (prod. 1946).  He continued writing until 1944, when he was diagnosed with a crippling neurodegenerative disease called cortical cerebellar atrophy.  In 1956, his work underwent a revival, and his posthumously published play, Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), won for the author his final Pulitzer Prize.

Eugene O'Neill died in Boston on November 27, 1953.

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