Eugene O%60Neill Biography and List of Works

One of the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century, a restless and bold experimenter, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936. Among O'Neill's best-known plays are ANNA CHRISTINE (pub. 1922), DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS (pub.1924), MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA (pub. 1931), LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO THE NIGHT (pub. 1956), and THE ICEMAN COMETH (prod. 1946). O'Neill's plays range in style from satire to tragedy. They often depict people who have no hope of controlling their destinies.

"... We all are more or less the slaves of conventions, or of discipline, or of a rigid formula of some sort."

O'Neill was born in New York into a theatrical Irish-Catholic family. O'Neill's early life was restless: his father, who was an actor, spent most of his career touring in the lead role of the popular melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo. In 1895 O'Neill was enrolled in the St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, and transferred in 1900 to the DeLa Salle Institute in Manhattan. During these years his mother's addiction to morphine left profound emotional scars on O'Neill. After renouncing Catholicism, O'Neill entered the Betts Academy in Stamford, a non-sectarian preparatory school, in 1902. Six years later he entered Princeton University, but left after a year. During this period he spent most of the time in New York waterfront bars and brothels.

In 1909 he married Kathleen Jenkins. The marriage ended two years later. They had one son, who would eventually commit suicide at the age of forty. O'Neill went to sea in 1910, living the life of a tramp at the docksides. During this period he attempted suicide. He returned to his family in Connecticut, but was forced to spend six months in a sanatorium due to the onset of tuberculosis. After recovering O'Neill began writing plays. He was enrolled in George Pierce Baker's 47A Workshop at Harvard University (1914-1915), and then joined the Provincetown Players.

"The Hairy Ape was propaganda in the sense that it was a symbol of a man, who has lost his old harmony with nature, the harmony which he used to have as an animal and has not yet acquired in a spiritual way. Thus, not being able to find it on earth nor in heaven. he's is in the middle, trying to make peace, taking the "woist punches from bot' of 'em." ... The subject here is the same ancient one that always was and always will be the one subject for drama, and that is man and his struggle with his own fate. The struggle used to be with the gods, but is now with himself, his own past, his attempt "to belong."
(Eugene O'Neill in Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961)

In the late 1910s O'Neill dramas begun to gain recognition in New York. Between 1918 and 1924 he wrote among others Anna Christie, THE FIRST MAN, THE HAIRY APE, THE FOUNTAIN, and WELDED. In 1918 he married the writer Agnes Boulton; they had two children. By 1924 he settled into a Bermuda retreat. His second marriage ended in 1929. In the same year O'Neill married the actress Carlotta Monterey, with whom he first settled in France, then in Sea Island, Georgia, and finally in California. O'Neill saw his children infrequently. He disinherited his son Shane because he did not approve of his life style, and his daughter Oona, because she had married Charles Chaplin at the age of eighteen.

The Pulitzer winning BEYOND THE HORIZON (pub. 1920) was O'Neill's first important play. The story depicts two brothers, Andrew the elder, a practical realist, and the younger Robert, a poetic idealist. Robert is incapable of managing the family farm. When Andrew returns from a long voyage, successful and wealthy, he finds Robert dying of tuberculosis. On his deathbed, Robert still dreams of freedom beyond the horizon.

Mourning Becomes Electra, based on Aeschylus's Orestean trilogy, was O'Neill's version of the tragedy of the house of Atreus, set in 19th-century New England. The action centres on Lavinia (Electra). General Ezra Mannon, on his return from the American Civil war, is murdered by his wife Christine. Lavinia avenges her father's murder by persuading her brother, Orin (Orestes), to kill her mother's lover. The murder is followed by the suicide of the mother. Orin goes mad when he discovers that he has an incestuous passion for his sister. Lavinia locks herself in the family mansion, surrounded by the ghosts of the past.

In 1935 O'Neill began work on a cycle of eleven plays, with the theme of the destructiveness of American materialism. The cycle was never completed - only two plays have survived. In his final productive period O'Neill wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, an agonized portrait of his own family, HUGHIE (pub. 1959), a story about a small time gambler, and A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN (pub. 1952), which continued O'Neill's family history of the Tyrones.

The Iceman Cometh is perhaps the finest of O'Neill's tragedies. The story is set in a dockside bar on the lower west side of New York City. It concerns a group of drunken derelicts that spend their time in the back room of Henry Hope's saloon where they discuss their hopeless lives. Their daily routines are shattered when Hickey, a salesman, appears as a messiah, and encourages them to start rehabilitation. They eventually discover that their quasi-redeemer is himself a madman and murderer, and lapse once more into their comfortable world of whiskey.

Poor health prevented O'Neill from attending the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden. His remaining productive years were characterized by long periods of illness. After a failed production of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943, he wrote no major new plays. O'Neill gradually became paralysed and he died on November 27, 1953 in Boston. He wrote 45 plays.

For further reading: Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays by B.H. Clark (1947); Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension by D.V. Falk (1958, rev. ed. 1982); The Plays of Eugene O'Neill by J.H. Raleigh (1965); O'Neill's Scenic Image by T. Tiusanen (1969); A Drama of Souls by E. Törnqvist (1968); Contour in Time by T. Bogard (1972); Eugene O'Neill by F.I. Carpenter (1979); Tragedy, Modern Temper, and O'Neill by C. Ahuja (1984); Final Acts by J.E. Berlin (1985); Eugene O'Neill: An Annotated Bibliography by M. Smith and R. Eaton (1988); Staging O'Neill by Ronald Harold Wainscott (1988); Conversations with Eugene O'Neill, ed. by Mark W. Estrin (1990); Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle by Doris Alexander (1992); Down the Nights and Down the Days by Edward Lawrence (1996); Eugene O'Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle by Donald Clifford Gallup (1998); The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill, ed. by Michael Manheim (1998);- See also: Eugenio Montale - Note: in his Nobel acceptance speech O'Neill considered the plays of August Strindberg the source of his own inspiration. On the other hand, he was the model for later American playwrights, such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee.

BREAD AND BUTTER, (1914)