Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was among the foremost dramatists of the America theater. His main concern was with the anguish and turmoil that wrack the spirits of sensitive people.

Eugene O'Neill set out to create meaningful drama in America at a time when the barriers against it were significant. Although outstanding dramatists were getting productions throughout Europe, American dramatists were locked into standard commercial practices by the monopolistic forces controlling the theater. As a result, by the time of O'Neill's first production (1916), the American theater was a quarter century behind European theater. Twenty years later, when O'Neill received the Nobel Prize for literature, America had assumed a leadership position in world drama; O'Neill was preeminent in this rise.

Eugene O'Neill was born on Oct. 16, 1888, in New York City at a hotel on Broadway. His father was James O'Neill, an outstanding romantic actor. Eugene's mother was Ella Quinlan. Eugene had two brothers, James, Jr. (born 1878), and Edmund (born 1883). Edmund's death 2 years later brought deep feelings of guilt into the family.

Eugene spent his first 7 years on tour with his parents. A succession of dreary hotel rooms and a mother addicted to drugs left their impact upon him. He also received a total exposure to theater.

From the age of 7 to 12, Eugene was taught by nuns. His next 2 years were spent under the Christian Brothers. When he rebelled against any further Catholic education, his parents sent him to Betts Academy in Connecticut for high school. He was also learning about life at this time under the guidance of his brother, Jamie, who "made sin easy for him." Eugene's formal education ended with an unfinished year at Princeton University in 1907. By this time his three main interests were evident: books, alcohol, and prostitutes.

O'Neill worked halfheartedly for a mail-order firm until the fall of 1908. In 1909 he secretly married Kathleen Jenkins before leaving on a mining expedition to Honduras, where he contracted malaria. Returning in April 1910, he revealed his marriage because of Kathleen's pregnancy. Eugene O'Neill, Jr., was born the next month.

O'Neill shipped out as a seaman in 1910 and did odd jobs in Buenos Aires, spending almost 6 months as a pan-handler on the waterfront before going to sea again. Back in New York in 1911, he spent several weeks drinking in Jimmy the Priest's saloon before shipping out to England. He returned in August to his old hangout. Almost half his published plays show his interest in the sea.

In 1912 O'Neill hit bottom. His marriage was dissolved, his attempt at suicide failed, and he contracted tuberculosis. But he also decided to become a dramatist. He was released from the sanitarium in June 1913.

Early Plays

Tall and thin, dark-eyed and handsome, with a brooding sensitivity, O'Neill was a man of many paradoxical qualities. Though he was ready to work, he was by no means ready to change his way of living completely. During the next year he wrote prolifically. Except for Bound East for Cardiff, these early plays are finger exercises. With his father's aid, five of these one-act plays were published in 1914. On the basis of this work and with the assistance of the critic Clayton Hamilton, O'Neill joined George Pierce Baker's playwriting class at Harvard in September 1914.

O'Neill planned to return to Harvard in the fall of 1915 but ended up instead at the "Hell Hole," a combination hotel and saloon in New York City, where he drank heavily and produced nothing. He next joined the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The Players' production of Bound East for Cardiffin 1916 signaled a new era in American drama. By the end of 1918, the Players had produced 10 of O'Neill's plays. Such excellent exposure, combined with the support of the critic George Jean Nathan, rocketed O'Neill into prominence. His plays of the sea were most successful, particularly Bound East for Cardiff (1916), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), which are sometimes produced together under the title of S.S. Glencairn.

In his early writing O'Neill concentrated heavily on the one-act form. His apprenticeship in this form culminated in great success with the production of his full-length Beyond the Horizon (1920), for which he won his first Pulitzer Prize. The play is definitely indebted to the one-act form in its structure. Although the drama is essentially naturalistic, O'Neill elevated both characterization and dialogue, and for the first time, by adding a poetic and articulate character, he gave himself the opportunity to reach high dramatic moments.

In 1918 O'Neill married Agnes Boulton. They had a son, Shane, and a daughter, Oona. Meanwhile, O'Neill met his son Eugene, Jr., for the first time in 1922, when the boy was 12 years old. O'Neill's family died in close succession: his father (1920), mother (1922), and brother (1923). Following this tumult, his marriage was troubled; O'Neill had fallen in love with Carlotta Monterey. In 1928 he left Agnes Boulton, divorced in 1929, and soon married Carlotta.

In spite of pressures in his personal life, O'Neill was incredibly productive. In the 15 years following the appearance of Beyond the Horizon, 21 plays were produced. Always daring in his conceptions, always willing to experiment, he brought forth both brilliant successes and atrocious failures.

The Successes

O'Neill's successful plays reveal interesting experimentation—apart from Anna Christie (1921), a rather standardly organized and realistic play with some romantic overtones which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and Ah, Wilderness! (1933), a surprisingly nostalgic comedy unique in the O'Neill canon (both were later adapted to the musical stage). The Emperor Jones (1920) is a superb theatrical piece in which Brutus Jones moves from reality, to conscious memories of his past, to subconscious roots of his ancient heritage, as he flees for his life. The play ends in the reality of his death. Another expressionistic piece, The Hairy Ape (1922), traces the path of a burly stoker shocked into self-awareness by a decadent society woman, as he tries to find out where he belongs in the world.

Two plays deal with the human propensity to hide behind masks. In The Great God Brown (1926), masks are actually used. On his death, Dion Anthony wills his mask to William Brown, who then lives under the impact of dual masks. In Strange Interlude (1928), a massive treatment of the many roles of women as seen in the life of Nina Leeds, O'Neill used spoken "asides" (interior monologues) to disclose his characters' hidden and normally unspoken thoughts. For this play he received his third Pulitzer Prize.

The final successes stem from O'Neill's desire to reach the essence of tragedy. In Desire under the Elms (1924), he probed the tumult of passions burning deep on a New England farm. The peace which Eben and Abby find in their love is decidedly convincing. Ephraim's obdurate persistence also carries the ring of universal truth. Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), also set in New England, is O'Neill's version of Aeschylus's Oresteia. The ancient guilt of the house of Atreus is converted into Freudian terms in the depiction of the Mannon family. O'Neill's "Electra," Lavinia, is powerfully characterized, and her final expiation is a moving end to a most worthy play.

Mixed Receptions and Disasters

A grim and repulsive drama, Diff'rent (1920), a rather psychopathic portrait of a sexually obsessed woman, garnered mixed reviews. The Straw (1921), a story of love and selfishness dating back to O'Neill's experiences in the sanitarium, was generally accepted. Though All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) received tremendous publicity before its opening, O'Neill failed to deeply penetrate the realms of myth and bigotry. However, he did achieve a Job-like quality for the black husband. Babbitt and Marco Polo were aligned in a satiric and poetic expression in Marco Millions (1928). The play's best aspect is its pageantry; the poetry is somewhat disappointing.

Lazarus Laughed (1928) was not produced commercially in New York. Essentially a religious-philosophical epic, the play has some interesting scenes but a ponderous, turgid style.

Eight plays were disasters: Chris Christopherson (1920), Gold, (1921), The First Man (1922), Welded (1924), The Ancient Mariner (1924), a dramatization of Coleridge's poem, The Fountain (1925), Dynamo (1929), and Days without End (1934).

Later Life

Carlotta Monterey brought a sense of order to O'Neill's life. His health deteriorated rapidly from 1937 on, but her care helped him remain productive, though their marriage was not without furor.

In addition to the physical and psychological burdens of his poor health, O'Neill was also disturbed by his continued inability to establish relationships with his children. Eugene, Jr., died by suicide in 1950. Shane became addicted to drugs. Oona was ignored by her father after her marriage to actor Charlie Chaplin. The tragic lack of communication for which O'Neill had accused his father was a major flaw in his own relationships with his children. Indeed, he even excluded Shane and Oona from his will. When O'Neill knew that death was near, one of his final actions was to tear up six of his unfinished cycle plays rather than have them rewritten by someone else. These plays, tentatively entitled "A Tale of Possessors Self-dispossessed," were part of a great cycle of 9 to 11 plays which would follow the lives of one family in America. O'Neill's health prevented him from completing them. He died on Nov. 27, 1953.

Last Plays

With the exception of The Iceman Cometh (1946), all of O'Neill's late works received their New York production after his death. The Iceman Cometh, with its exhibition of pipe dreams in Harry Hope's saloon, fascinated audiences and overcame almost universal complaints about its length. Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), autobiographical in its totality, devoid of theatrical effects, utterly scathing in its insistence on truth, showed O'Neill at the height of his dramatic power. It received the Pulitzer Prize.

A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957) and A Touch of the Poet (1958), inevitably measured against the brilliance of Long Day's Journey into Night, were found to be of a lesser magnitude. In A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill focuses on his brother Jamie. Among all his late plays with their searching realism, A Touch of the Poet has the strongest elements of romantic warmth. Hughie (1964) offers nothing new in its treatment of illusion. More Stately Mansions (1967), a sequel to A Touch of the Poet, is not outstanding.

Further Reading

Barbara and Arthur Gelb, O'Neill (1962), is the indispensable biography. Doris Alexander, The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (1962), and Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill, Son and Playwright (1968), give effective biographical pictures of O'Neill's development period. Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story (1958), is an account by O'Neill's first wife, and Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten (1958), was written with the assistance of O'Neill's son Shane.

Of the numerous critical assessments of his work, particularly valuable are Sophus Keith Winther, Eugene O'Neill: A Critical Study (1934; 2d ed. 1961); Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill (1953); and Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension (1958). Interesting criticisms are in Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, O'Neill and His Plays (1961), and John Gassner, O'Neill (1964). Also worth attention are Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays (1926; rev. ed. 1947); Clifford Leech, Eugene O'Neill (1963); and Frederic Carpenter, Eugene O'Neill (1964). Jordan Y. Miller, Eugene O'Neill and the American Critic (1962), is a most helpful bibliographic work.

For background the following books are recommended: Montrose J. Moses, The American Dramatist (1911; rev. ed. 1925); Isaac Goldberg, The Theatre of George Jean Nathan (1926); and Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama since 1918 (1939; rev. ed. 1957). □

O'Neill, Eugene [ Gladstone] (1888–1953), playwright. Generally acknowledged as the greatest of all American dramatists, he was the son of the celebrated actor James O'Neill, and, though he was born in New York, he spent most of his first seven years accompanying his mother and older brother as they followed the actor from city to city. Six years of Catholic schooling were succeeded by four at the Betts Academy and a year at Princeton, after which he left to accept work in a mail‐order house, then spent time prospecting in Honduras. An attack of malaria forced his return to the United States, where he became assistant manager of a theatrical touring company. O'Neill then spent several years on a variety of ships, traveling as far as South America. He gave up sailing to accept a small role in his father's company, where he started to consider a writing career. His elder brother secretly helped him secure work on a newspaper, but with the onset of tuberculosis he entered a sanatorium and there more purposefully began writing plays. On his release he enrolled in Professor George Pierce Baker's classes on playwriting at Harvard, then in the summer of 1916 joined the Provincetown Players, the ensemble with which his professional career began. The young company presented his one‐acts Bound East for Cardiff (1916), Thirst (1916), Before Breakfast (1916), The Long Voyage Home (1917), The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), and others. In the Zone (1918) was first produced by the Washington Square Players, and by 1920 O'Neill's one‐acters had clearly stamped him as the most promising of young American playwrights, a promise he moved toward fulfilling with his first full‐length play, Beyond the Horizon (1920). This realistic drama was followed by the expressionistic The Emperor Jones (1920), demonstrating O'Neill's sense of experimentation that would characterize his career. Other notable works of the 1920s include Anna Christie (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), Marco Millions (1928), Strange Interlude (1928), and Dynamo (1929). This fertile period was capped by his masterful trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931); thereafter O'Neill worked at a slower pace, though he maintained the quality of his earlier writing. His only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933), was followed by his “modern miracle play” Days Without End (1934) before the onset of Parkinson's disease prompted O'Neill to retire from the theatrical arena for many years. Nevertheless, in 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

New York did not see another new O'Neill play until The Iceman Cometh (1946) although he was continually writing scripts that would not see the light of day for some time. His most ambitious project was a planned cycle of eleven plays tracing the history of a single American family for over a century. Before his death he destroyed most of the material for these plays, but two survived. Sickly, embittered, and overwhelmed with the despair that had long overshadowed his life, O'Neill died in 1953 believing that his life had amounted to little. It was a brilliant 1956 revival of The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square that began a positive reevaluation of his art. As a result, his widow released other works, which O'Neill had hoped would not be produced for several decades. The autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night was first produced in 1956 and remains, in the opinion of many, the playwright's finest work. Later that year A Touch of the Poet, one of the surviving plays from the projected cycle, and A Moon for the Misbegotten were given posthumous productions. In the 1960s two minor works were finally produced: the long one‐act Hughie (1964) and the unfinished More Stately Mansions (1967), also part of the planned cycle. Other one‐acts and fragments would surface over the years.

Although O'Neill was perceived early on as a master of stark, realistic tragedy, time has suggested that much of the power and beauty of his work came from its fundamental romanticism and even from a tinge of sentimentality that colored his tragic vision. These aspects, often touching on the supernatural, could be seen from the very start in the early one‐acts. But an intellectual or instinctive sureness usually allowed O'Neill to restrain his romantic impulses and weave them effectively into the basically realistic fabric of his stories. He was almost always at his best when he had a good story to tell and allowed its transcendental implications to simply speak for themselves. His understanding of the dark, labyrinthine side of human nature and of its limitations were unmatched by any other American dramatist and, whether he realized it or not, sufficed to assure him preeminence. When O'Neill attempted to analyze and expound upon his tragic vision, his theatrical acumen sometimes deserted him, so as a rule the most profoundly philosophic of his plays have been among the least actable and therefore the least commercially successful. Nor was he always comfortable when he departed from traditional dramatic structuring and essayed experiments in symbolism, expressionism, or other more or less‐novel forms. Curiously, as has long been noted, his plays rarely read well. On the printed page they often seem prolix and turgid. But O'Neill was such a natural child of the theatre that all but a handful of his works come irresistibly alive on stage. Biographies: O'Neill: Son and Playwright, Louis Shaeffer, 1968; O'Neill: Son and Artist, Louis Sheaffer, 1973.

O'NEILL, EUGENE 1888-1953

Playwright

The Greatest American Dramatist

American drama is divisible into two periods: before and after Eugene O'Neill. The son of James O'Neill, a popular actor, Eugene O'Neill was born in a hotel at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street and grew up in the theater. Rejecting the crowd-pleasing melodrama form, O'Neill enlarged the scope, material, and technique of American drama while setting high aspirations for himself and writing masterpieces that included The Emperor Jones (1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), The Iceman Cometh (1946), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947), and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956).

Apprenticeship

O'Neill was dismissed from Princeton during his freshman year and spent his young manhood as a sailor, alcoholic, and beachcomber. The destructive love and guilt of his family inspired O'Neill's later family dramas: the father believed he had wasted his talent in moneymaking roles; the mother was addicted to morphine; the alcoholic son Jamie was an embittered failure. O'Neill began writing plays in 1913, developing themes of family guilt and strife, the destructive power of love, the constrictions of marriage, the necessity for sensitive and gifted characters to escape their environments, the need for "pipe dreams," and—perhaps his main recurring theme—the tragic effects on people who betray their temperaments or violate their natures. His most memorable characters are obsessed by fixed ideas or romantic ideals. It was necessary for O'Neill to develop new techniques for the revelation of the inner lives of his characters.

Innovations

While for the most part retaining realistic speech and detail, O'Neill moved from his early realism and naturalism to "supernaturalism"—the systematic use of symbolism in a realistic work. He introduced expressionistic techniques into American drama in his endeavor to objectify the inner experience of his characters; expressionism employed distortion, simplification, exaggeration, and symbolic settings. The Emperor Jones is regarded as the first American expressionist play, followed by The Hairy Ape (1922). In his endeavors to expand the scope of American drama, O'Neill recovered techniques from the classics and gave them expressionistic treatments. In The Great God Brown (1926) masks indicate the characters' efforts to hide their conflicts of mind and soul. Lazarus Laughed (1927) employs masks and chorus. The effective use of spoken thoughts—O'Neill's version of the aside—in Strange Interlude solidified his reputation as a technical genius. O'Neill also rejected the structural requirements of the conventional well-made plays; Strange Interlude ran from 5:15 to 11 P.M., with a dinner break. Mourning Becomes Electra was inspired by Aeschylus's Oresteia; O'Neill described this trilogy as the "modern psychological approximation of the Greek sense of fate."

Later Work

O'Neill married actresss Carlotta Monterey—his third wife—in 1929. She managed every aspect of his life in order to facilitate his work, and she made it possible for him to give up alcohol. He became a virtual recluse in France, Bermuda, Sea Island, and California. O'Neill won the Pulitzer Prize four times—once posthumously. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize in literature. During the 1930s he worked on a nine-play cycle, "A Tale of Possessions Self-Dispossessed"—a study of the soul-destroying influence of business and property. But a tremor made it impossible for him to hold a pencil during his later years, and the work in progress on the cycle was destroyed, except for A Touch of the Poet and the unfinished More Stately Mansions. The last new play produced on Broadway during O'Neill's life was The Iceman Cometh, his most effective examination of the pipe-dream theme. The play concludes that humans require self-lies to sustain them; life without pipe dreams is too terrible for most people. This great play ran for only 136 performances in 1946, but subsequent productions have established its proper high position in the O'Neill canon.

Late Plays

During 1940-1943 O'Neill wrote two of his most personal plays about his family, renamed the Tyrones: Long Day's Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He left instructions that Long Day's Journey Into Night was not to be performed until twenty-five years after his death; nevertheless, his widow allowed 1956 productions, and the success of this play solidified O'Neill's reputation with audiences who had not seen his plays in the 1920s or 1930s. A Moon for the Misbegotten closed on the road in 1947, but it was effectively revived in the 1950s. Both plays examine the open wounds that tormented the O'Neills and found expression in the most important body of drama since the death of William Shakespeare. Eugene O'Neill did not merely enrich American drama: he reinvented it and prepared the way for the playwrights who followed.

Sources:

Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973);

Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968).

Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill 1888–1953, American dramatist, b. New York City. He is widely acknowledged as America's greatest playwright.

Early Life

O'Neill's father was James O'Neill, a popular actor noted for his portrayal of the Count of Monte Cristo. Young O'Neill, his mother, and his older brother lived an unsettled life traveling with James on tour. The tortured relationships in his family haunted O'Neill all his life and are reflected in many of his plays. From boarding school he entered Princeton in 1906 but remained there only a year. During the next few years he traveled widely and held a variety of jobs, acquiring experience that familiarized him with the life of sailors, stevedores, and the outcasts who populate many of his plays.

O'Neill was stricken with tuberculosis in 1912 and spent six months in a sanatorium, where he decided to become a playwright. In the next two years he wrote 13 plays. He studied with George Pierce Baker at Harvard (1914–15) and in the summer of the following year began his association with the Provincetown Players , a theatrical group that produced many of his one-act plays.

Plays

O'Neill's first full-length play to be produced was Beyond the Horizon (1920; Pulitzer Prize), a grim domestic drama set in New England. After several "ambitious" failures, O'Neill's first great play, Desire under the Elms (1924), was produced; set in 19th-century New England, it dramatizes the impassioned battle for dominance between a hard, puritanical father and his sensitive son. O'Neill's next important work, The Great God Brown (1926), is a complicated, symbolic play about a modern man's futile struggle to identify himself with nature. Strange Interlude (1928; Pulitzer Prize), a nine-act drama, is a Freudian character study of an emotionally sterile woman, whose frequent asides give expression to her deeper thoughts and feelings. His other plays of the period include Marco Millions (1928), Lazarus Laughed (1928), and Dynamo (1929).

In 1931 O'Neill's great trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra was produced. Set in post–Civil War New England, it is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth surrounding the murder of Agamemnon . After Days Without End (1934), no new O'Neill play was performed until The Iceman Cometh (1946). Considered by many critics his greatest work, it looks at a group of drunken outcasts who are stripped of their illusions by a misguided, guilt-ridden savior. In 1936 O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947), about the frustrated love between an alcoholic and a farm woman, was not well received, but a revival of the play in 1973 was successful.

Later Life and Plays

Near the end of his life O'Neill renounced his daughter Oona when, at 18, she married the actor Charlie Chaplin, a man her father's age; O'Neill himself contracted a crippling disease that made him unable to write. At his death O'Neill left several important plays in manuscript, including the autobiographical masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced 1956; Pulitzer Prize), and two parts of an unfinished cycle of plays using American history as a background— A Touch of the Poet (first U.S. production, 1958) and More Stately Mansions (first U.S. production, 1967).

Bibliography

See biographies by L. Sheaffer (2 vol., 1968–73), A. and B. Gelb (2 vol., rev. ed. 1974; new ed., Vol. I, 2000), and N. Berlin (1988); studies by O. Cargill et al. (1961), T. Bogard (1972), and J. Chothia (1982).

O'Neill, Eugene (1888–1953), American dramatist. His first big success was the full-length naturalistic drama Beyond the Horizon (1920), which was followed in the same year by his expressionistic The Emperor Jones, a tragedy, and Anna Christie (1921), a naturalistic study of a prostitute on the New York waterfront. Among other important plays of this period were The Hairy Ape (1922), All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), and Desire under the Elms (1924). He experimented with a stream-of-consciousness technique in Strange Interlude (1928), and adapted the theme of the Oresteia to the aftermath of the American Civil War in his trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Ah! Wilderness (1932) and Days without End (1934) were followed by a long absence from the stage during which he was awarded the Nobel Prize (1936). The Iceman Cometh (1946) is a lengthy naturalistic tragedy set in Harry Hope's Bowery Saloon, where a collection of down-and-out alcoholics nourish their illusions (‘pipe dreams’) with the aid of an extrovert salesman, Hickey. His masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), was written in 1940–1; it is a semi-autobiographical family tragedy, portraying the mutually destructive relationships of drug-addicted Mary Tyrone, her ex-actor husband James, and their two sons, hard-drinking Jamie and intellectual Edmund. His last play was A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947). O'Neill transcends his debt to Ibsen and Strindberg, producing an œuvre in which the struggle between self-destruction, self-deception, and redemption is presented as essentially dramatic in nature.

O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone (1888–1953) US dramatist. His first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon (1920), won the Pulitzer Prize, as did Anna Christie (1921). The Emperor Jones (1920) was an experiment with expressionism. He won a third Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interlude (1928). His interest in Greek tragedy is evident in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). In 1936, O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Suffering from Parkinson's disease, he did not produce another play until The Iceman Cometh (1946). He won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night (1956).

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