Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

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 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."

Eugene O'Neill was born in New York into an Irish-Catholic theatrical family. His 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 the growing O'Neill. He also found out that his own birth had precipitated his mother's addiction. In 1902 Ella O'Neill tried to commit suicide. After renouncing Catholicism, O'Neill entered in 1902 the Betts Academy in Stamford, a non-sectarian preparatory school. Six years later he entered Princeton University, but left it 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 as to commit suicide at the age of forty. O'Neill went to sea in 1910, living the life of a tramp at docksides. Once he attempted suicide, overdosing in a flophouse. He stayed with his family in Connecticut, but was then forced by the onset of tuberculosis to spend six months in a sanatorium. 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 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 the years 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. O'Neill's father died in 1921 from cancer, next year he lost his mother, and twelve months after that his brother Jamies died from a stroke.

During the early 1920s O'Neill formed with Robert Edmond Jones and Kenneth Macgowan, a gifted producer, a "Triumvirate" that ran the Experimental Theater at the Provincetown Playhouse. While still married to Agnes, O'Neill used the help of his friend Macgowan to send roses to the beautiful actress Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill's second marriage ended in 1929. In the same year he married 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 son's life style, and his daughter Oona, because at the age of eighteen she married Charles Chaplin.

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. After H.L. Mencken's criticism of WELDED (1924) O'Neill wrote to the critic George Jean Nathan: "Damn that word, 'realism!' When I first spoke to you of the play as a 'last word in realism,' I meant something 'really real,' in the sense of being spiritually true, not meticulously life-like." (from Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill, edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer, 1988)

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 centers around 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 turmoils of American materialism. The cycle was never completed - only two plays have survived. On his final productive period O'Neill wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, an agonized portrait of his own family, the Tyrones in the play. Again the action takes place in one room. Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction: "None of us can help the things life has done to us" says Mary. Edmund, based on the author himself, is stricken with tuberculosis. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. HUGHIE (pub. 1959) was a story about a small time gambler, and A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN (pub. 1952) 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 who spend their time in the back room of Henry Hope's saloon where they discuss their hopeless lives. One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician. Their daily routines are shattered when Hickey, a salesman and the son of a preacher, appears as a messiah, and encourages them to start rehabilitation. They find out that their new hero is himself a madman and murderer, who has killed his wife, 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 creative 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 became gradually paralyzed and he died on November 27, 1953 in Boston. He wrote 45 plays.