Eugene O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in 1888 in a hotel on what is now Times Square, the son of the touring actor James O’Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, whose addiction to morphine began after his difficult birth. He was educated at Catholic boarding schools and spent a single year at Princeton before going to sea, where he found both a lasting love of the ocean and years of drink and despair. In 1912, after a suicide attempt and the end of his first marriage, he contracted tuberculosis; recovering in a sanatorium, he resolved to become a playwright.

From 1916 the Provincetown Players staged his early one-act plays of sailors and outcasts, first on Cape Cod and then in Greenwich Village. Beyond the Horizon opened on Broadway in 1920 and won the Pulitzer Prize, as did Anna Christie and Strange Interlude. O’Neill brought to American drama the realism of Ibsen and Strindberg, the vernacular speech of the docks and back rooms, and a restless appetite for experiment — masks, expressionist staging, spoken thoughts — in plays such as The Emperor Jones, Desire Under the Elms and the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra. His characters cling to hopes that slide into disillusion.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1936, and in accepting it paid tribute to Strindberg as his master. His late plays, including The Iceman Cometh and the autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, published after his death and awarded a fourth Pulitzer, are now counted among his finest. O’Neill died in a Boston hotel in 1953.