Eugene O'Neill

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Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning 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 disillusionment and despair.

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Life

Eugene O' Neill's life was intimately connected to New London, Connecticut. His father was the Irish-born stage actor James O'Neill, who had grown up in impoverished circumstances. His mother, Ella Quinlan O'Neill, was the emotionally fragile daughter of a wealthy father who died when she was 17. O'Neill's mother was also addicted to morphine from the time he was born; she had never recovered from the death of her second son, Edmund, who had died of measles at the age of two.

O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room. Due to his father's touring, he spent his early years backstage at theatres and on trains as the family moved from place to place. His mother hadn't wanted another child and his childhood was an unhappy one. At the age of seven he was sent to a Catholic boarding school which he detested. During those years, he found his only real solace in books.

After being suspended from Princeton University, he spent several years as a sailor, during which time he suffered from severe depression and thoughts of suicide. O'Neill's parents and older brother Jamie died within three years of one another (Jamie drank himself to death at 45), which only added to his mental anguish. He ultimately turned to writing as a form of escape.

Associated with the Provincetown Players, several of his early plays were put on by that group (of actors and playwrights). O'Neill was also employed by the New London Telegraph, and dabbled in playwriting while working here. It wasn't until his experience at Gaylord Farms Sanatorium (where he was recovering from tuberculosis) that he decided to devote himself fulltime to writing plays. (Connecticut College maintains an O'Neill archive and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in 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 was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds about the life of John Reed, in which he served as the film's voice of anti-communism and "sobriety.")

In 1929 O'Neill 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 lived there until 1944. His house 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, and was awarded 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 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 10-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 as being among his best works until decades later.

Actress Carlotta Monterey was O'Neill's third wife. Although in the first years of their marriage she organized his life, making it possible for him to devote himself to writing, she later became addicted to bromide and the marriage deteriorated, resulting in a number of separations. (O'Neill always complained about her cooking, maintaining that the only things she knew how to make were chili with cornbread.)

In 1943 the aging dramatist renounced his daughter, Oona O'Neill (by his second wife, Agnes Bolton), for marrying the 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin when she was just 18 (Chaplin was only a year O'Neill's junior), and refused her repeated attempts at a reconciliation. Nevertheless, she and Chaplin were married for 34 years, and named their second son Eugene.

O'Neill's oldest child, Eugene O'Neill Jr (by his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins) was a Yale classicist who suffered from alcoholism, and committed suicide at the age of 40. His second son, Shane (by Agnes Bolton) was an alcoholic and heroin addict, and also killed himself.

After suffering from multiple health-related problems (including alcoholism) over a period of decades, O'Neill ultimately faced a severe Parkinsons-like tremor in his hands which, during the last 10 years of his life, made it impossible for him to write (he had tried dictation but found himself unable to work in that way). O'Neill died on November 27, 1953 in Boston, and was interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Although his written instructions had stipulated that it not be made public until 25 years after his death, in 1956 his wife arranged for his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night to be published, and produced, on stage to tremendous critical acclaim (it is now considered to be his finest play). Other posthumously-published plays include A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).

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