Eugene O'Neill

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Eugene O'Neill

Born Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
October 16, 1888(1888-10-16)
New York, New York, United States
Died November 27, 1953 (aged 65)
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation Playwright
Nationality American
Notable award(s) Nobel Prize in Literature
1936

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888–November 27, 1953) was a Nobel-prize winning American playwright. O'Neill's plays were among the first to introduce into American drama the techniques of realism, associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular. His plays involve characters who inhabit the fringes of society, engaging in depraved behavior, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote only one comedy (Ah, Wilderness!): all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

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[edit] Birth

O'Neill's father was an Irish-born stage actor named James O'Neill, who had grown up in impoverished circumstances and became famous for playing the title role in a stage version of The Count of Monte Cristo. His mother, Ella Quinlan O'Neill, was the emotionally fragile daughter of a wealthy father, her father having died when she was seventeen. O'Neill's mother never recovered from the death of her second son, Edmund, who had died of measles at the age of two. She later became addicted to morphine as a result of Eugene O'Neill's difficult birth.

Eugene O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in Times Square. The site is now a Starbucks; a commemorative plaque is posted on the outside wall. The plaque states, "Eugene O'Neill, October 16, 1888 ~ November 27, 1953 America's greatest playwrite was born on this site then called Barrett Hotel, Presented by Circle in the Square."[citation needed] Because of his father's profession, O'Neill was sent to a Catholic boarding school where he found his only solace in books.

[edit] Youth

Eugene O'Neill spent his summers in New London, Connecticut. After being suspended from Princeton University, he spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression and alcoholism. O'Neill's parents and older brother Jamie (who drank himself to death at the age of 45) died within three years of one another, and O'Neill turned to writing as a form of escape. Despite his depression he had a deep love for the sea, and it became a prominent theme in most of his plays, several of which are set onboard ships like the ones that he worked on.

O'Neill's first play, Bound East for Cardiff, premiered at this theatre on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
O'Neill's first play, Bound East for Cardiff, premiered at this theatre on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

It wasn't until his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium (where he was recovering from tuberculosis) that he decided to devote himself full time to writing plays. O'Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. (Connecticut College maintains the Louis Sheaffer Collection, consisting of material collected by O'Neill's most thorough biographer. The principal collection of O'Neill papers is at Yale University. The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut fosters the development of new plays under his name.)

During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he also befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Party USA founder John Reed. O'Neill also at one time had a romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. O'Neill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds about the life of John Reed.

[edit] Work and Family life

His involvement with the Provincetown Players began in the summer of 1916. O'Neill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays." Susan Glaspell describes what was probably the first ever reading of "Bound East for Cardiff" which took place in the living room of Cook and Glaspell home on Commercial Street, adjacent to the wharf (pictured) that was used by the Players for the their theatre. Glaspell writes, in The Road to the Temple,"So Gene took 'Bound East for Cardiff' out of his trunk, and Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished." [1] The Provincetown Players performed many of O'Neills early works in the their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and then moved to Broadway.

O'Neill was married to Kathleen Jenkins from 2 October 1909 to 1912, during which time they had one son, Eugene Jr. (b. 1910). In 1917, O'Neill met Agnes Boulton, a successful writer of commercial fiction, and they married in 12 April 1918. The years of their marriage—during which the couple had two children, Shane and Oona—are described vividly in her 1958 memoir Part of a Long Story. They divorced in 1929, after O'Neill abandoned Boulton and the children for the actress Carlotta Monterey (San Francisco, California, December 28, 1888—Westwood, New Jersey, November 18, 1970). Eugene and Carlotta married less than a month after Eugene officially divorced his wife.

In 1929, O'Neill and Monterey moved to the Loire Valley in central France, where they lived in the Chateau du Plessis in St. Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. During the early 1930s they returned to the United States and lived in Sea Island, Georgia, at a house called Casa Genotta. He moved to Danville, California in 1937 and lived there until 1944. His house there (known as Tao House), is today the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site.

O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His best-known plays include "Anna Christie" (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms 1924, Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra 1931, and his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his own youth as he wished it had been. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. After a ten-year pause, O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The following year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and did not gain recognition as being among his best works until decades later.

He was also part of the modern movement to revive the classical heroic mask from ancient Greek theatre and Japanese Noh theatre in some of his plays.[2]

O'Neill was very interested in the Faust theme, especially in the 1920s.[3] He is also known for the very poetic names of many of his plays.

In their first years together, Monterey organized O'Neill's life, enabling him to devote himself to writing. However, she later became addicted to potassium bromide, and the marriage deteriorated, resulting in a number of separations. (O'Neill always complained about her cooking, maintaining that the only thing she knew how to make was chili with cornbread.) She was dramatic and shallow, but O'Neill needed her, and she needed him. Although they separated several times, they never divorced.

In 1943, O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona for marrying the English actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54. He never saw Oona again.

He also had distant relationships with his sons, Eugene O'Neill Jr., a Yale classicist who suffered from alcoholism, and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40, and Shane O'Neill, a heroin addict who also committed suicide.

[edit] Illness and death

O'Neill in the mid-1930s. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936
O'Neill in the mid-1930s. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936

After suffering from multiple health problems (including alcoholism) over many years, O'Neill ultimately faced a severe Parkinsons-like tremor in his hands which made it impossible for him to write (he had tried using dictation but found himself unable to compose in that way) during the last 10 years of his life. While at Tao House, O’Neill had intended to write a cycle of 11 plays chronicling an American family since the 1800s. Only two of these, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions were ever completed. As his health worsened, O’Neill lost inspiration for the project and wrote the three large autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He managed to complete Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943, just before leaving Tao House and losing his ability to write. Drafts of many other uncompleted plays were destroyed by Carlotta at Eugene’s request.

O'Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65.(The building is now the Shelton Hall dormitory at Boston University.) There is an urban legend perpetuated by students that O'Neill's spirit haunts the room and dormitory. A revised analysis of his autopsy report shows that, contrary to the previous diagnosis, he did not have Parkinson's disease, but a late-onset cerebellar cortical atrophy. He was interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. O'Neill's final words were reportedly "Born in a hotel room, and Goddammit, died in one!"

Although his written instructions had stipulated that it not be made public until 25 years after his death, in 1956 Carlotta arranged for his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night to be published, and produced on stage to tremendous critical acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. This last play is widely considered to be his finest. Other posthumously-published works include A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).

O'Neill's home in New London, Monte Cristo Cottage, was made a National Historic Landmark in 1971. His home in Northern California was preserved as the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in 1976.


[edit] Selected Works

See also: Category:Eugene O'Neill plays
Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:

[edit] One-act plays

The Glencairn Plays, which all feature characters on the fictional ship Glencairn:

Other one-act plays include:

  • A Wife for a Life
  • Fog
  • Thirst
  • Before Breakfast
  • The Sniper
  • Ile
  • The Web
  • The Movie Man

[edit] Full-length plays

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The Road to the Temple. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927. 2nd ed. 1941, p. 255
  2. ^ Smith, Susan Valeria Harris, "Masks in Modern Drama", Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. See pp.66-70, 106-08, 131-36 and index [S124].
  3. ^ Floyd, Virginia, "Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment". Cf. Chapter 2, p.180: "O'Neill was obsessed with the Faust theme, the idea that in America a man's soul was 'always for sale'".

Servitude (1980)

[edit] Further reading

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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Nobel Laureates in Literature

Grazia Deledda (1926) · Henri Bergson (1927) · Sigrid Undset (1928) · Thomas Mann (1929) · Sinclair Lewis (1930) · Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1931) · John Galsworthy (1932) · Ivan Bunin (1933) · Luigi Pirandello (1934) · Eugene O'Neill (1936) · Roger Martin du Gard (1937) · Pearl S. Buck (1938) · Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939) · Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1944) · Gabriela Mistral (1945) · Hermann Hesse (1946) · André Gide (1947) · T. S. Eliot (1948) · William Faulkner (1949) · Bertrand Russell (1950)
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