Eugene Gladstone
O'Neill 1888-1953
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill Sr. (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce Realism into the U.S, earlier associated with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg. Eugene O’Neill is widely considered the father of Modern American drama.
The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest American plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in a hotel, the Barrett House, on what was then Longacre Square (now Times Square) in New York City.He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, who was also of Irish descent. His father suffered from alcoholism; his mother from an addiction to morphine, prescribed to relieve the pains of the difficult birth of her third son Eugene.
In 1895 O'Neill was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school.In 1900 he became a day student at the De La Salle Institute in Manhattan.He also briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford. He attended Princeton University for one year.O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which was fighting for improved living conditions for the working class.
Living in New York in poverty, O'Neill attempted suicide in 1912 in his room at Jimmy-the-Priest's boarding house and saloon, which became the setting for his play The Iceman Cometh.After recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full time to writing plays. O'Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. In the fall of 1914, O'Neill studied at Harvard University with George Pierce Baker, who ran a famous course called “Workshop 47” that taught the fundamentals of playwriting, but left after one year.
In an early one-act play, The Web, written in 1913, O'Neill focused on the brothel world and the lives of prostitutes.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 first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920.His best-known plays include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!
In 1936 O'Neill received theNobel Prize in Literature. He was profoundly influenced by the work of Swedish writer August Strindberg, and dedicated much of his Nobel acceptance speech to him.
O'Neill was married to Kathleen Jenkins (from 1909, to 1912), and they had one son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. He is married to Agnes Boulton, a writer (from 1918 to 1929) and they had one son and a daughter-Shane and Oona, who are described in memoir Part of a Long Story. He is married to the third and final wife, Carlotta Monterey, an actress, less than a month after he officially divorced his previous wife.
While at Tao House, O'Neill had intended to write a collection of works he called "the Cycle", chronicling American life spanning from 1755 to 1932. Only two of the eleven plays O'Neill proposed, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, were completed.
O'Neill died at the Sheraton Hotel (now Boston University's Kilachand Hall) on Bay State Road in Boston on November 27, 1953, at age 65. As he was dying, he whispered: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room."
Full-length plays:
1. Bread and Butter, 1914
2. Servitude, 1914
3. The Personal Equation, 1915
4. Now I Ask You, 1916
5. Beyond the Horizon, 1918 -Play opens on a farm in the Spring, and then moves forward three years later, in the Summer, and finally five years later, in late Fall.tragedy of two brothers Andrew Mayo and Robert Mayo, who tragically swap their natural destinies. Robert, abandons his plans to explore the world to marry Ruth and run the family farm, while Andrew, a born farmer, takes Robert’s place at sea to escape his heartbreak over Ruth. This decision ruins all three lives. Ends with, Robert’s death as he looks toward the horizon he never reached.Pulitzer Prize, 1920
6. The Straw, 1919
7. Chris Christophersen, 1919
8. Gold, 1920
9. Anna Christie, 1920 -four act play- based on his earlier work ‘Chris Christopherson’-Anna Christie arrives in New York to live with her father, Chris Christopherson, an alcoholic barge captain who abandoned her as a child.Anna falls for Mat Burke, a shipwrecked sailor.When Anna reveals her past life as prostitute, both men initially abandon her.At the play’s end, Anna has agreed to wait for their return.Pulitzer Prize, 1922
10. The Emperor Jones, 1920-originally titled The Silver Bullet. Story of Brutus Jones, an African American fugitive (black man) who becomes the self-appointed emperor of a Caribbean island, by exploiting the superstitions and ignorance of an island's residents.He convinces the locals he is a god who can only be killed by a silver bullet.
11. Diff'rent, 1921
12. The First Man, 1922
13. The Hairy Ape, 1922-expressionist play in 8 scenes, about a beastly, unthinking laborer known as Bob Yank Smith. Mildred Douglas, rich daughter of an industrialist in the steel business, refers to him as a "filthy beast."Deeply hurt, Yank goes to New York City to find a place where he fits in, but he is rejected by both the wealthy and the working-class rebels. Feeling like he doesn't belong in the human world at all, he goes to the zoo to talk to a gorilla, thinking they are the same.
14. The Fountain, 1923
15. Marco Millions, 1923–25
16. All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1924- about racism- Set in New York, the play depicts the marriage between Jim Harris, a Black man aspiring to be a lawyer, and Ella Downey, a white woman
17. Welded, 1924
18. Desire Under the Elms, 1924- famous, adapt plot elements and themes of Greek tragedy to a rural New England setting. West coast is frontier. It’s a love triangle between father, son and step mother. The characters EbenCabot, his stepmother Abbie Putnam, and his father Ephraim Cabot roughly correspond with Hippolytus, and his stepmother Phaedra, and his father Theseus respectively. Ephraim Cabot owns the farm in New England, and his three adult sons—Simeon, Peter (from his first marriage), and Eben (from his second marriage to ‘Maw’). Ageing Cabot marries Abbie Putnam, who later flirts with Eben. Abbie and Eben turn themselves in for murdering their baby, and they declare their love for each other.
19. Lazarus Laughed, 1925–26
20. The Great God Brown, 1926-characters uses physical masks to dramatize the "split personalities"
21. Strange Interlude, 1928 - Pulitzer Prize 1928- nine-act experimental play -begins in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The central character, Nina Leeds, is profoundly disillusioned and grief-stricken after her fiancé, Gordon Shaw, is killed in the war.
22. Dynamo, 1929- Reuben Lightbecomes disillusioned with his father’s strictreligion. Heturns to modern science and technology as a substitute, eventually becoming obsessed with a hydroelectric generator (the "Dynamo") and worshipping it as a new, mechanical god.
23. Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931-modern psychological reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. It is divided into three plays with themes that correspond to the Oresteia trilogy. Much like the Aeschylus plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, these three plays by O'Neill are correspondingly titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted, respectively.
24. Ah, Wilderness!, 1933- only well-known comedy.
25. Days Without End, 1933
26. More Stately Mansions, written 1937–1938, first performed 1967
27. The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, published 1940, first performed 1946- set in Harry Hope’s New York City saloon (bar) in 1912. It focuses on a group of societal outcasts whodrink and survive by clinging to "pipe dreams"—false hopes and illusions about their past, present, and future ("the tomorrow movement").Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, who attempts to stop dreams and force them to face the truth.
28. Long Day's Journey into Night, written 1941, first performed 1956; lay in four acts, won Pulitzer Prize1957- magnum opus- tragic masterpiece, this semi-autobiographical play. Written between 1939–1941, and instructed not be published until 25 years after his death.Buthis widow Carlotta Monterey published it posthumously in 1956.It takes place on a single day in August 1912. The setting is Monte Cristo Cottage.
29. A Moon for the Misbegotten, written 1941–1943, first performed 1947
30. A Touch of the Poet, completed in 1942, first performed 1958
One-act plays
The Glencairn Plays, all of which feature characters on the fictional ship Glencairn—filmed together as The Long Voyage Home:
1. Bound East for Cardiff, 1916
2. In the Zone, 1917
3. The Long Voyage Home, 1917
4. Moon of the Caribbees, 1918
Other one-act plays include:
1. A Wife for a Life, 1913
2. The Web, 1913
3. Thirst, 1913
4. Recklessness, 1913
5. Warnings, 1913
6. Fog, 1914
7. Abortion, 1914
8. The Movie Man: A Comedy, 1914
9. The Sniper, 1915
10. Before Breakfast, 1916
11. Ile, 1917
12. The Rope, 1918
13. Shell Shock, 1918
14. The Dreamy Kid, 1918
15. Where the Cross Is Made, 1918
16. Exorcism, 1919
17. Hughie, written 1941, first performed 1959
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