I.

Introduction

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), American playwright, whose work dramatizes the plight of people driven by elemental passions, by memory and dream, and by an awareness of the forces that threaten to overwhelm them. His early plays, appearing between 1916 and 1920, helped initiate American theater’s shift away from elegant parlor dramas and toward gritty naturalistic plays.

O’Neill’s later plays covered varied ground, leaping from expressionism—an attempt to depict subjective feelings or emotions rather than objective reality—to comedy, and finally to modern reworkings of classical myth. His best tragic plays reflect his statement that he was “always conscious of the Force behind—Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery certainly—and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle….”

O’Neill won Pulitzer Prizes in drama for his plays Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1921), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). In 1936 he became the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

II.

Early Life

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in a New York City hotel room, the second son of James and Ella O’Neill. For most of Eugene’s childhood the family lived on the road while his father, an Irish-born actor, repeatedly played the lead role in a dramatic version of the historical novel Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844; The Count of Monte-Cristo, 1846) by French writer Alexandre Dumas. “You might say I started as a trouper,” O’Neill would recall. “I knew only actors and the stage. My mother nursed me in the wings and in dressing rooms.”

O’Neill was educated in Catholic schools until, as a teenager, he insisted on attending a nonreligious boarding school. He spent his boyhood summers at the family’s summer home in New London, Connecticut, the setting of several of his plays. O’Neill’s mother had become addicted to morphine after being prescribed it while giving birth to him, and when he was 15 years old, O’Neill discovered his mother’s addiction. He then entered an emotionally turbulent period characterized by drunken sprees, including one for which he was thrown out of Princeton University. Despite his problems with alcohol, O’Neill was a voracious reader. He especially liked Irish-born writer George Bernard Shaw, Russian political activist Emma Goldman, and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

From 1909 to 1912 O’Neill jumped from experience to experience. He prospected for gold in Honduras, served as an assistant manager of a theatrical troupe organized by his father, went to South America and South Africa as a seaman, toured as an actor with his father’s troupe, and worked as a newspaper reporter in New London. His time at sea provided vivid memories that would enliven his early plays.

III.

Becoming a Playwright

A turning point in O’Neill’s life came in 1912. Early that year, he tried to commit suicide. In the fall, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a Connecticut sanatorium, where he wrote his first plays. He avidly read Swedish playwright August Strindberg, “who first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be.” Resolved “to be an artist or nothing else,” he took a playwriting seminar at Harvard University and was soon writing one-act plays. After leaving the sanatorium, O'Neill studied at Harvard from 1914 to 1915 under the famous theater scholar George Pierce Baker. The experimental theater group the Provincetown Players performed his first play, Bound for East Cardiff, in 1916. This brooding drama, about a dying sailor recalling his life aboard the ship the SS Glencairn, was followed by three other plays involving the Glencairn, all of which feature stark settings and vernacular dialogue. They helped usher in a new realism in American theater.

Longer, more deeply felt plays appeared in the 1920s. Many of these dramas were strongly influenced by the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and they stripped away people’s civilized veneers and probed their inner psyches. Beyond the Horizon focuses on the fruitless dreams of a farm family. The Emperor Jones (1920), which was one of the first American plays with a lead role for black actors, concerns the leader of a West Indies island whose subjects rebel, drive him into the jungle, and finally kill him. It uses expressionistic techniques such as distorting time and action to expose characters’ emotional states. Anna Christie features a noble prostitute, slang-filled dialogue, and the use of the fog and the sea to symbolize different states of mind.

In The Hairy Ape (1922) a ship’s stoker, the person who feeds coal into the ship’s furnace, is transformed into an animalistic rough. All God’s Chillun’s Got Wings (1924) dramatizes problems associated with a racially mixed marriage. Desire Under the Elms (1925) alludes to themes of Greek mythology and uses New England farm life as the setting for a tragic tale involving adultery, incest, and infanticide. The Great God Brown (1926) probes the psychology of a businessman, and the hugely popular nine-act Strange Interlude follows the life of a woman from daughter to wife to mother, using interior monologue to trace her quest for happiness.

O’Neill continued exploring the interior self in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), in which the tragic Greek story of Electra provides mythic resonance to the story of a New England family confronted by death during the Civil War (1861-1865). O’Neill produced his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, in 1933. A story of small-town life set at O’Neill’s childhood summer home in Connecticut, Ah, Wilderness! became one of his most popular plays.

IV.

Last Decades

In 1934 O’Neill entered a highly creative but withdrawn period. No new play appeared on Broadway for several years, but O’Neill continued writing while he lived contentedly with his third wife. In the mid-1940s his plays again began to be produced. The most important were The Iceman Cometh (1946), A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957). Of these, only Iceman appeared during O’Neill’s lifetime. Set in 1912, Iceman depicts a group of New York City saloon lodgers, feeding their dreams with booze and chatter, disrupted by an intrusive salesman. In A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill fictionalized the close relationship between his alcoholic brother, Jamie, and their mother, represented as a strong Irish matron.

A Long Day’s Journey into Night is even more autobiographical. It portrays a day in the life of a failed actor, his drug-addicted wife, and their two sons, one of whom is a drunk and the other an ex-sailor with wistful memories of sea life. Haunted by failed ambitions and unachievable dreams, each member of the Tyrone family represents the average person drifting toward the “night” of death. Poet T. S. Eliot said it was “one of the most moving plays I have ever seen,” and critic Brendan Gill described it as “the finest play written in English in my lifetime.”

During the last years of his life, O’Neill suffered from a crippling nervous disorder that eventually ended his writing. Editions of O’Neill’s writings include The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (3 volumes, 1951), Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill (1988), and Conversations with Eugene O’Neill (1990).