Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an Irish-American playwright.

His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. 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's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusion and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Early life

O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888 in a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, on what was then Longacre Square (now Times Square) in New York City. A commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957. The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which houses offices, shops and the ABC Studios.

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 Eugene, who was her third son. Because his father was often on tour with a theatrical company, accompanied by Eugene's mother, in 1895 O'Neill was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. In 1900, he became a day student at the De La Salle Institute on 59th Street in Manhattan.

The O'Neill family reunited for summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. He also briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford. He attended Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to why he left. He may have been dropped for attending too few classes, been suspended for "conduct code violations", or "for breaking a window", or according to a more concrete but possibly apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle into the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson", the future president of the United States.

O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression, alcoholism and despair. Despite this, he had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. 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 using quick 'on the job' direct action. O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie (who drank himself to death at the age of 45) died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater.

Family life

O'Neill was married to Kathleen Jenkins from October 2, 1909, to 1912, during which time they had one son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (1910–1950). In 1917, O'Neill met Agnes Boulton, a successful writer of commercial fiction, and they married on April 12, 1918. They lived in a home owned by her parents in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, after their marriage. The years of their marriage—during which the couple lived in Connecticut and Bermuda and had two children, Shane and Oona—are described vividly in her 1958 memoir Part of a Long Story. They divorced on July 2, 1929, after O'Neill abandoned Boulton and the children for the actress Carlotta Monterey (born San Francisco, California, December 28, 1888; died Westwood, New Jersey, November 18, 1970). O'Neill and Carlotta married less than a month after he officially divorced his previous wife.

In 1929, O'Neill and Monterey moved to the Loire Valley in central France, where they lived in the Château du Plessis in Saint-Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. During the early 1930s they returned to the United States and lived in Sea Island, Georgia, at a house called Casa Genotta. He moved to Danville, California in 1937 and lived there until 1944. His house there, Tao House, is today the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site.

In their first years together, Monterey organized O'Neill's life, enabling him to devote himself to writing. She later became addicted to potassium bromide, and the marriage deteriorated, resulting in a number of separations, although they never divorced.

In 1943, O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona for marrying the English actor, director, and producer Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54. He never saw Oona again.

He also had distant relationships with his sons. Eugene O'Neill Jr., a Yale classicist, suffered from alcoholism and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40. Shane O'Neill became a heroin addict and moved into the family home in Bermuda, Spithead, with his new wife, where he supported himself by selling off the furnishings. He was disowned by his father before also committing suicide (by jumping out of a window) a number of years later. Oona ultimately inherited Spithead and the connected estate (subsequently known as the Chaplin Estate). In 1950 O'Neill joined The Lambs, the famed theater club.

Child

• Eugene O'Neill Jr. May 5, 1910 September 25, 1950
• Shane O'Neill October 30, 1919June 23, 1977
• Oona O'Neill May 14, 1925 September 27, 1991

Illness and death

After suffering from multiple health problems (including depression and alcoholism) over many years, O'Neill ultimately faced a severe Parkinsons-like tremor in his hands which made it impossible for him to write during the last 10 years of his life; he had tried using dictation but found himself unable to compose in that way. While at Tao House, O'Neill had intended to write a cycle of 11 plays chronicling an American family since the 1800s. Only two of these, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, were ever completed. As his health worsened, O'Neill lost inspiration for the project and wrote three largely autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He managed to complete Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943, just before leaving Tao House and losing his ability to write. Drafts of many other uncompleted plays were destroyed by Carlotta at Eugene's request.

O'Neill died at the Sheraton Hotel (now Boston University's Kilachand Hall) on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65. As he was dying, he whispered: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room." He is interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

In 1956 Carlotta arranged for his autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night to be published, although his written instructions had stipulated that it not be made public until 25 years after his death. It was produced on stage to tremendous critical acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. This last play is widely considered to be his finest. Other posthumously published works include A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).

In 1967, the United States Postal Service honored O'Neill with a Prominent Americans series (1965–1978) $1 postage stamp.

In 2000, a team of researchers studying O'Neill's autopsy report concluded that he died of cerebellar cortical atrophy, a rare form of brain deterioration unrelated to either alcohol use or Parkinson's disease.

Work

Full-length plays

• Bread and Butter, 1914
• Servitude, 1914
• The Personal Equation, 1915
• Now I Ask You, 1916
• Beyond the Horizon, 1918 - Pulitzer Prize, 1920
• The Straw, 1919
• Chris Christophersen, 1919
• Gold, 1920
• Anna Christie, 1920 - Pulitzer Prize, 1922
• The Emperor Jones, 1920
• Diff'rent, 1921
• The First Man, 1922
• The Hairy Ape, 1922
• The Fountain, 1923
• Marco Millions, 1923–25
• All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1924
• Welded, 1924
• Desire Under the Elms, 1924
• Lazarus Laughed, 1925–26
• The Great God Brown, 1926
• Strange Interlude, 1928 - Pulitzer Prize
• Dynamo, 1929
• Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931
• Ah, Wilderness!, 1933
• Days Without End, 1933
• The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, published 1940, first performed 1946
• Long Day's Journey into Night, written 1941, first performed 1956; Pulitzer Prize 1957
• A Moon for the Misbegotten, written 1941–1943, first performed 1947
• A Touch of the Poet, completed in 1942, first performed 1958
• More Stately Mansions, second draft found in O'Neill's papers, first performed 1967
• The Calms of Capricorn, published in 1983

One-act plays

The Glencairn Plays, all of which feature characters on the fictional ship Glencairn—filmed together as The Long Voyage Home:

• Bound East for Cardiff, 1914
• In the Zone, 1917
• The Long Voyage Home, 1917
• Moon of the Caribbees, 1918

Other one-act plays include:

• A Wife for a Life, 1913
• The Web, 1913
• Thirst, 1913
• Recklessness, 1913
• Warnings, 1913
• Fog, 1914
• Abortion, 1914
• The Movie Man: A Comedy, 1914
• The Sniper, 1915
• Before Breakfast, 1916
• Ile, 1917
• The Rope, 1918
• Shell Shock, 1918
• The Dreamy Kid, 1918
• Where the Cross Is Made, 1918
• Eugene O'Neill's "Exorcism" 1919
• Hughie, written 1941, first performed 1959

Other works

• Tomorrow, 1917. A Small Story published in The Seven Arts, Vol. II, No. 8 in June 1917.
• The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog, 1940. Written to comfort Carlotta as their "child" Blemie was approaching his death in December 1940.