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.