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.