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.
