O'Neill, Eugene (1888–1953), playwright.In his most famous play,
Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), O'Neill drew upon the most formative aspects of his own family life: Irish, Roman Catholic, alcoholic, contentious. His actor father, famous for his role in
The Count of Monte Cristo, was lower class and sexually profligate; his mother, middle class and ineffectual, escaped her miseries through morphine. O'Neill educated himself chiefly at the Unique Book Shop of the New York anarchist Benjamin Tucker and by attendance at plays by such avant‐garde dramatists as Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. The thinkers who most influenced him included the philosopher Max Stirner, the radical Emma
Goldman, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and the playwright August Strindberg. A lover of the sea, O'Neill also absorbed the novels of Joseph Conrad and distilled their contents in numerous short plays.
Carrying to America the Scandinavian revolt against conventional middle‐class drama, O'Neill made his first permanent mark with
The Emperor Jones (1920), incidentally creating a major role for such black actors as Charles Gilpin and Paul
Robeson.
The Hairy Ape (1922), exploring the lower depths of the working class in an age of
technology, confirmed his place as the leading American expressionist in any art. Fascinated by ideas of atavism and free association that he discovered in the work of the Swiss Freudian Carl Jung, he enjoyed great popular success with
Strange Interlude (1928), a work whose sexually liberated heroine, based in part on the journalist Louise Bryant, became for many emblematic of
Greenwich Village bohemianism.
Strange Interlude won a Pulitzer Prize; the Nobel Prize followed in 1936. Most contemporary critics rank
The Iceman Cometh, a bleak drama of 1946, or
Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) as O'Neill's best play. O'Neill's obsessions still dominated serious theater in America a half century after his death, and foreigners continued to rank him as the only American playwright worthy of a place beside Ibsen and Strindberg.
See also
Drama;
Theater;
Twenties, The.
Bibliography
Louis Sheaffer , O'Neill, 2 vols., 1968–1973.
Travis Bogard , Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, 1972.
Michael Manheim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill, 1998.
Robert M. Crunden
