Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), American dramatist, Nobel laureate, and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, who attempted to define fundamental human problems in his works. He is considered the most important writer in the American theatre.

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in New York, on October 16, 1888, the son of the Irish-American actor James O'Neill. He accompanied his father on theatrical tours during his youth, attended Princeton University for one year (1906-1907), and worked subsequently as a clerk in New York. From 1909 to 1912 he prospected for gold in Honduras, served as 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, Connecticut. Having contracted a mild case of tuberculosis, in 1912 he went to a sanatorium, where he wrote his first plays. After leaving the sanatorium, he studied (1914-1915) the techniques of playwriting at Harvard University under the famous theatre scholar George Pierce Baker.

During most of the next ten years Eugene O'Neill lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and New York, where he was associated both as a dramatist and as a manager with the Provincetown Players. This experimental theatrical group staged a number of his one-act plays, beginning with Bound East for Cardiff (1916), and several long plays, including The Hairy Ape (1922). Beyond the Horizon (1920; Pulitzer Prize, 1921), a domestic tragedy in three acts, was produced successfully on the Broadway stage, as was The Emperor Jones (1920), a study of the disintegration of the mind of a black dictator under the influence of fear. In the nine-act play Strange Interlude (1927; Pulitzer Prize, 1928) O'Neill sought to portray the way in which hidden psychological processes impinge upon outward actions. The play was revolutionary in style and length, using techniques new to the modern theatre of spoken asides or soliloquies to express the characters' inner thoughts. His most ambitious work, the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), was an attempt to re-create the power and profundity of the ancient Greek tragedies by setting the themes and plot of the Oresteia by Aeschylus in 19th-century New England. Ah, Wilderness (1932), written in a relatively light vein, was highly successful.

O'Neill's other dramas include Moon of the Caribbees (1918), Anna Christie (1921; Pulitzer Prize, 1922), All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), Lazarus Laughed (1926), Marco Millions (1928), Dynamo (1929), and Days Without End (1934).

From 1934 until his death O'Neill suffered from a crippling nervous disorder similar to Parkinson's disease. During this entire period he worked intermittently on a long cycle of plays concerning the history of an American family but completed only A Touch of the Poet (produced 1958) and More Stately Mansions (United States production 1967). After 1939 he wrote three other plays unrelated to the cycle: The Iceman Cometh (1946), which portrays a group of social misfits unable to live without illusions, and two tragedies dealing with his own family, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced 1956, Pulitzer Prize, 1957) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (produced 1957). O'Neill was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, the only American playwright ever to receive the award. He died in Boston, on November 27, 1953.

Many of O'Neill's dramas are marked by new theatrical techniques and symbolic devices that express religious and philosophical ideas and give his characters psychological depth. He employed the sound of tom-toms gradually increasing in volume to mark an increase in tension, masks to indicate shadings of personality, lengthy asides in which his characters voice their thoughts, and choruses used as in ancient Greek tragedies to comment on the play's action.

O'Neill's best works convey forcibly his vision of modern humans, victims of circumstances who cannot believe in God, destiny, or free will and who therefore blame impersonal causes for their misery and punish themselves for their own sin and guilt. Despite the seriousness and theatrical brilliance of many of O'Neill's plays, much of his symbolism is obscure, and his innovations in stagecraft often do not achieve the desired effects. In addition, the language of his characters has been criticized for lapses into banality or bathos at many of the most compelling moments of his plays. By bringing psychological realism, philosophical depth, and poetic symbolism into the American theatre, however, O'Neill's work raised the standards of most later American dramatists.