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Eugene O'Neill was born in a New York hotel on 16th October, 1888. The son of the famous actor, James O'Neill, Eugene spent most of his early years on tour with his father. This nomadic life and his mother's drug addiction had a profound impact on his development.

O'Neill was eventually sent away to a Catholic boarding school but he rebelled against being taught by nuns and monks. After a spell at Betts Academy in Connecticut he went briefly to Princeton University. Seeking adventure he went on a mining expedition to Honduras before becoming a sailor in 1910.

After a failed marriage to Kathleen Jenkins, O'Neill attempted suicide. He recovered only to discover he contracted tuberculosis and when he was released from a sanitarium in June 1913 he decided to become a playwright.

In 1915 a group of left-wing writers including Floyd Dell, John Reed, George Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell and Louise Bryant, established the Provincetown Theatre Group. A shack at the end of the fisherman's wharf at the seaport of Provincetown was turned into a theatre. On 28th July, 1916 the group performed O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff. This was followed by The Thirst with Louise Bryant taking the lead role.

John Reed attempted to help O'Neill get his work published. He sent a copy of Tomorrow to Carl Hovey, the editor of the Metropolitan. He wrote to Reed: "I've read O'Neill's story and agree with you that he can write. This thing is genuine and makes a real man live before you." However, Hovey rejected the story because he believed the story had a "lack of either plot or a situation with suspense enough to carry the reader beyond the first pages." Later, Waldo Frank managed to get the story published in the Seven Arts magazine.

George Gig Cook, who emerged as the leader of the Provincetown Theatre Group, believed that O'Neill was a dramatist of great promise and over the next three years ten of his plays were performed including The Fog (1916), two anti-war plays, The Sniper (1917), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), Moon of the Caribbees (1918), Shell-Shock (1918), and The Emperor Jones (1920), a play where a black actor plays the central role.

O'Neill initially concentrated on writing one-act plays but it was his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon (1920), that established his reputation as a dramatist. This play won a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by Anna Christie (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), The Great God Brown (1926) and Strange Interlude (1928).

Always a heavy drinker, O'Neill's health deteriorated during the 1930s. Also suffering from Parkinson disease, O'Neill wrote little during this period although in 1936 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1940 O'Neill wrote the autobiographical play, Long Day's Journey Into Night. The action takes place during a single day in August 1912 at the summer home of the Tyrone family. The members of the family are the father, an actor, the drug-addicted mother, an alcoholic son and his younger brother suffering from tuberculosis (based on O'Neill himself). The play explores the tragic nature of family relations but was not performed during O'Neill's lifetime.

The Iceman Cometh (1946) was the first new play of O'Neill's to be performed for twelve years. One of his favourite plays, O'Neill claimed it was an attempt to portray man as a "victim of the ironies of life and himself".

Eugene O'Neill died in 1953. Long Day's Journey Into Night was first performed in 1956. The following year it joined Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie in winning the Pulitzer Prize.

 

 

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(1) Floyd Dell, Homecoming, (1933)

In Provincetown in 1915 he (George Cook) found an unknown young playwright, Eugene O'Neill, whose little one-act plays were superb and beautiful romanticizations and glorifications and justifications of failure. And now George's life had what it needed; his life was henceforth lived under the aegis of Eugene O'Neill's plays, which is dreamed of bringing to the Village and producing there.

In (1926) George Cook had come to a crisis in his life; he was spiritually centered in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and now the young playwright had decided to deal directly with Broadway, refusing to allow the Provincetown Players to put on his plays before they went uptown. This was an entirely reasonable decisions on his part, but it broke George Cook's heart. In February, the Provincetown Theatre suspended operations, and a month later, George Cook and Susan Glaspell sailed for Greece.


(2) Susan Glaspell wrote about Eugene O'Neill's play, Bound East for Cardiff at Provincetown in her book, Road to the Temple (1923)

I may see it through memories too emotional but it seems to me I have never sat before a more moving performance than our Bound East for Cardiff, when Eugene O'Neill was produced for the first time on any stage. Jig was Yank. As he lay in his bunk dying, he talked of life as one who knew he must leave it.

The sea had been good to Eugene O'Neill. It was there for his opening. There was a fog, just as the script demanded, fog bell in the harbour. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavour of the sea while the big dying sailor talked to his friend Drisc of the life he had always wanted deep in the land, where you'd never see a ship or smell the sea.


(3) Heywood Broun wrote about Bound East for Cardiff for the New York Tribune (30th January, 1917).

Here is a play which owes more to the creation of mood and atmosphere than to any fundamentally interesting idea or sudden twist of plot. Eugene O'Neill has written several short plays about the sea. He strikes a rich vein, the old Kipling vein.


(4) William Bullitt saw the letters that Eugene O'Neill wrote to Louise Bryant during their affair in 1915.

If the letters were sincere, and they sounded so, O'Neill was certainly at one time violently in love with her. His letters to Louise were wails of despairing, unrequited love. Louise burned them - without sign of emotion - merely because she believed that the private emotions of individuals were not the concern of anyone else.

So far as I know, Louise was never in love with O'Neill. She thought he had talent, felt sorry for him, and tried to help him. She described to me his frequent fits of drunkenness and his suicidal inclinations. On more than one occasion she helped literally to pick him out of the gutter.


(5) Art McGinley, talking about Eugene O'Neill in the 1920s.

Gene was a periodic drinker, and once started wouldn't stop - I guess he couldn't stop - until he was really sick. He was the most trying morning-after drinker I've ever known. He would gloom up and not say a word, or else talk of suicide, he was so disgusted with himself. But when he stopped drinking, he would work around the clock. I never knew anyone who had so much self-discipline.


(6) Agnes Boulton, Eugene O'Neill's second wife, wrote about him in her book, Part of a Long Story (1958).

He never seemed to be what is called drunk, but there would be some sudden and rather dreadful outbursts of violence, and others of bitter nastiness and malevolence when he appeared more like a madman than anything else.

 

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