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Born in 1888, Eugene O'Neill was the
son of James O'Neill, one of America's
most popular actors from the 1880s
until World War I. In 1909, he set out
on a gold-prospecting voyage to
Honduras--only to be sent home six
months later with a tropical fever.
During the period that followed, he
spent time working as a stage manager,
an actor, and a reporter. It was here
that he came in contact with the
sailors, dock workers and outcasts that
would populate his plays, the kind of
characters the American theatre had
heretofore passed over in silence.
During this time he contracted
tuberculosis and was sent to a
sanatorium for six months. It was
during this time that O'Neill began to
read not only the classic dramatists,
but also Ibsen, Wedekind and Strindberg-
-"especially Strindberg" he would later
confess. He then turned his hand to
playwriting, quickly churning out
eleven one-act plays and two full-
lengths, not to mention a bit of
poetry. In 1916, O'Neill met the group
who founded the Provincetown Players.
Shortly thereafter, the group produced
O'Neill's one-act play Bound East for
Cardiff . Other short pieces followed
at the playhouse on MacDougal Street in
New York City, and soon O'Neill's plays
became the mainstay of this
experimental group. Beyond the Horizon
was produced on Broadway in 1920
earning him his first Pulitzer Prize.
He received countless productions both
in the United States and abroad. His
many plays of the 1920’s include The
Emperor Jones (1921), The Hairy Ape
(1923), Anna Christie (1922, Pulitzer
Prize), Desire Under the Elms (1925),
The Great God Brown (1926), and Strange
Interlude (1928, Pulitzer Prize). In
1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize--a
feat that no other American playwright
had been able to accomplish. O’Neill
developed a profound artistic honesty
which would result in several genuine
masterpieces of the modern theatre
including A Touch of the Poet (1935-
1942), More Stately Mansions (1935-
1941), The Iceman Cometh (1939), A Long
Day's Journey into Night (1939-41) and
A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Most
of these were not published or produced
during O'Neill's lifetime. Then, in
1956, three years after the
playwright's death, a successful
revival of The Iceman Cometh and the
first Broadway production of A Long
Day's Journey into Night, returned
Eugene O'Neill once again to his
rightful place at the forefront of
American Drama. Today, he is recognized
not only as the first great American
dramatist, but, as one of the great
dramatists of all time.
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