Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 - November 27, 1953) was an American playwright. More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism pioneered by Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg into American drama. Generally, his plays involve characters who inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into dillusionment and despair.
Although O'Neill was born in New York City, his early life was intimately connected to New London, Connecticut. His father was stage actor James O'Neill, who had owned property in New London before Eugene's birth. His mother was addicted to morphine. O'Neill is often associated with the "Provincetown Players", and several of his early plays were put on by that group of actors and playwrights. As an adult, O'Neill was employed by the New London Telegraph, and wrote his first plays while living there. (Connecticut College maintains an O'Neill archive and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. 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 was also at one time a lover of Reed's wife Louise Bryant. O'Neill is portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds about the life of John Reed, in which he serves as the film's voice of anticommunist realism and sobriety.
In 1929 he moved to the Loire Valley of northwest France, where he lived in the Chateau du Plessis in St. Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. He moved to Danville, California in 1937 and resided there until 1944. His home 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, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His best-known plays include Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude (for which he again won the Pulitzer Prize), Mourning Becomes Electra, and his career's 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 would not gain recognition and placement among his best works until decades later.
Carlotta Monterey was O'Neill's third wife. The aging dramatist renounced his daughter, Oona O'Neill, for marrying Charlie Chaplin when she was only 18 years old (Chaplin was one year her father's junior). Nevertheless, Oona and Chaplin had a long and happy marriage, with 8 children and ending only in Chaplin's death.
In 1953, O'Neill died in the Sheraton Hotel in Boston, a building which is currently used by Boston University as Shelton Hall dormitory. Inside Shelton Hall there is a plaque dedicated to O'Neill and the 4th floor where he died is now the Writers' Corridor. He was interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
In 1956, three years after O'Neill's death, his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night was published and produced on stage. His other posthoumously published plays were A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).
Selected Works
- Beyond the Horizon, 1920
- The Hairy Ape, 1922
- The Emperor Jones
- Anna Christie, 1922
- Desire Under the Elms, 1925
- Strange Interlude, 1928
- Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931
- Ah, Wilderness!, 1933
- The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, first performed 1946
- Long Day's Journey Into Night, written 1941, first performed 1956
- A Moon for the Misbegotten, 1943
- A Touch of the Poet, completed in 1942, first performed 1958
- More Stately Mansions, second draft found in O'Neill's papers, first performed 1967
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