Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill (New York, 1888 - Boston, 1953) was an American playwright who brought to the American stage the realism that Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg had pioneered in Europe. Writing in English, he helped American theatre find a voice of its own. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, a record no other playwright has matched.

He was born in a Broadway hotel, the son of James O'Neill, an actor of Irish origin who had grown up in poverty, and Ella Quinlan, whose morphine addiction, begun after a difficult birth, shaped family life. He spent much of his childhood backstage and on the trains that carried his father's touring company. At seven he was sent to a Catholic boarding school, where reading became his only comfort. He spent a single year at Princeton University and left, though the reasons given vary.

His youth was unsettled. He held poorly paid jobs, went looking for gold in Honduras, worked at sea for several years and lived in Buenos Aires. A depression led him into heavy drinking, and in those years his parents and his older brother Jamie, who drank himself to death, all died. Writing offered him a way out. He joined the Provincetown Players, an amateur company that staged some of his early plays. After a suicide attempt and a diagnosis of tuberculosis, he resolved to devote himself entirely to the theatre while recovering in a sanatorium.

His first major play to open on Broadway, Beyond the Horizon (1920), earned him his first Pulitzer. His characters tend to live on the edges of society, struggle to keep their hopes alive and end in disillusion and despair. The sea, drink and exploitation recur throughout his work. He wrote dialogue in American vernacular and in some plays drew on Greek tragedy, as in Mourning Becomes Electra. Nearly all his plays are tragic. His best-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been, is the notable exception.

His personal life was turbulent. He was married three times, to Kathleen Jenkins, Agnes Boulton and Carlotta Monterey, and his relations with his children were often strained. In 1943 he disowned his daughter Oona after she married Charles Chaplin, and reportedly never saw her again. In later years he developed Parkinson's disease, which left him unable to write for nearly a decade. He died in Boston in 1953.

Shortly after his death, Carlotta Monterey saw Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) into print, although he had asked that his work be withheld for twenty-five years. It is now regarded as his most complete work. Income from these publications helped fund the O'Neill Award, given each year by the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. His legacy lies in giving American theatre a voice of its own and an unsparing view of the human condition.