Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature.
Background
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in the Barrett House, a family-style hotel in New York, in an Irish family to James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan.
Eugene's father was an actor and due to his father’s touring profession his mother also travelled extensively and settled down shortly only during births of her three children. His early childhood saw him hovering between hotel rooms, backstage and trains. He faced a challenging childhood as his father suffered from alcoholism and his mother was a morphine addict.
Education
Around Eugene's seventh birthday, he was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a boarding school in Bronx where he spent years growing up in a strict Catholic atmosphere.
In 1900 Eugene came back to New York and studied at the De La Salle Institute for two years. Thereafter he attended the Betts Academy in Stamford, Connecticut.
Eugene enrolled in the Princeton University in 1906 only to drop out after ten months. He was either suspended due to misconduct or violation, short attendance or due to his own disorientation in studies.
O'Neill worked halfheartedly for a mail-order firm until the fall of 1908. In 1910 he shipped out as a seaman and did odd jobs in Buenos Aires, spending almost 6 months as a panhandler on the waterfront before going to sea again. Back in New York in 1911, he spent several weeks drinking in Jimmy the Priest's saloon before shipping out to England. He returned in August to his old hangout. Almost half his published plays show his interest in the sea. In 1912 O'Neill hit bottom. His marriage was dissolved, his attempt at suicide failed, and he contracted tuberculosis. But he also decided to become a dramatist. He was released from the sanitarium in June 1913.
During the next year he wrote prolifically. Except for Bound East for Cardiff, these early plays are finger exercises. With his father's aid, five of these one-act plays were published in 1914. On the basis of this work and with the assistance of the critic Clayton Hamilton, O'Neill joined George Pierce Baker's playwriting class at Harvard in September 1914.
O'Neill planned to return to Harvard in the fall of 1915 but ended up instead at the "Hell Hole," a combination hotel and saloon in New York City, where he drank heavily and produced nothing. He next joined the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The Players' production of Bound East for Cardiff in 1916 signaled a new era in American drama.
By the end of 1918, the Players had produced 10 of O'Neill's plays. Such excellent exposure, combined with the support of the critic George Jean Nathan, rocketed O'Neill into prominence. His plays of the sea were most successful, particularly Bound East for Cardiff (1916), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), which are sometimes produced together under the title of S.S. Glencairn.
In his early writing O'Neill concentrated heavily on the one-act form. His apprenticeship in this form culminated in great success with the production of his full-length Beyond the Horizon (1920), for which he won his first Pulitzer Prize. The play is definitely indebted to the one-act form in its structure. Although the drama is essentially naturalistic, O'Neill elevated both characterization and dialogue, and for the first time, by adding a poetic and articulate character, he gave himself the opportunity to reach high dramatic moments.
In the 15 years following the appearance of Beyond the Horizon, 21 plays were produced.
A grim and repulsive drama, Diff'rent (1920), a rather psychopathic portrait of a sexually obsessed woman, garnered mixed reviews. The Straw (1921), a story of love and selfishness dating back to O'Neill's experiences in the sanitarium, was generally accepted. Though All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) received tremendous publicity before its opening, O'Neill failed to deeply penetrate the realms of myth and bigotry. However, he did achieve a Job-like quality for the black husband. Babbitt and Marco Polo were aligned in a satiric and poetic expression in Marco Millions (1928). The play's best aspect is its pageantry; the poetry is somewhat disappointing. Lazarus Laughed (1928) was not produced commercially in New York. Essentially a religious-philosophical epic, the play has some interesting scenes but a ponderous, turgid style. Eight plays were disasters: Chris Christopherson (1920), Gold, (1921), The First Man (1922), Welded (1924), The Ancient Mariner (1924), a dramatization of Coleridge's poem, The Fountain (1925), Dynamo (1929), and Days without End (1934).
His health deteriorated rapidly from 1937. In addition to the physical and psychological burdens of his poor health, O'Neill was also disturbed by his continued inability to establish relationships with his children. When O'Neill knew that death was near, one of his final actions was to tear up six of his unfinished cycle plays rather than have them rewritten by someone else. These plays, tentatively entitled "A Tale of Possessors Self-dispossessed," were part of a great cycle of 9 to 11 plays which would follow the lives of one family in America.
O'Neill's health prevented him from completing them. He died on November 27, 1953. With the exception of The Iceman Cometh (1946), all of O'Neill's late works received their New York production after his death. The Iceman Cometh, with its exhibition of pipe dreams in Harry Hope's saloon, fascinated audiences and overcame almost universal complaints about its length. Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), autobiographical in its totality, devoid of theatrical effects, utterly scathing in its insistence on truth, showed O'Neill at the height of his dramatic power. A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957) and A Touch of the Poet (1958), inevitably measured against the brilliance of Long Day's Journey into Night, were found to be of a lesser magnitude. In A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill focuses on his brother Jamie.
Among all his late plays with their searching realism, A Touch of the Poet has the strongest elements of romantic warmth. Hughie (1964) offers nothing new in its treatment of illusion. More Stately Mansions (1967), a sequel to A Touch of the Poet, is not outstanding.
He remained one of the pioneers in introducing poetically titled plays, which were usually used by certain playwrights of Russia, Sweden and Norway. O'Neill’s tragic masterpiece, ‘Long Day's Journey Into Night’, produced after his death in 1956, is not only considered his best work but also listed among greatest American plays of the twentieth century. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.
O'Neill's home in New London, Monte Cristo Cottage, was made a National Historic Landmark in 1971. His home in Danville, California, near San Francisco, was preserved as the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in 1976. There is also a Theatre in New York City named after him located at 230 West 49th Street in midtown-Manhattan. The Eugene O'Neill Theatre has housed musicals and plays such as Yentl, Annie, Grease, Spring Awakening, and The Book of Mormon.
Quotations:
"God gave us mouths that close and ears that don't... that should tell us something."
"There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now."
"We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open."
"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever."
"We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves."
Personality
Always daring in his conceptions, always willing to experiment, he brought forth both brilliant successes and atrocious failures.
Physical Characteristics:
Tall and thin, dark-eyed and handsome, with a brooding sensitivity, O'Neill was a man of many paradoxical qualities.
Connections
From October 2, 1909 to 1912 Eugene was married to Kathleen Jenkins. The couple had a son Eugene O'Neill, Jr. From April 12, 1918 to 1929 he was married to writer Anges Boulton. They had two children. Just after his divorce with Anges, he married actress Carlotta Monterey in 1929.
