Paul Eugene Louis Deschanel

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O'Neill, Eugene [Gladstone] (1888–1953),born in New York City, as a child accompanied his father, James O'Neill (1847–1920), a popular romantic actor, on theatrical tours, and later attended a Catholic boarding school and a Connecticut preparatory school. He entered Princeton (1906), but remained there only a year. After secretarial work in New York, he went on a gold prospecting trip to Honduras (1909), but contracted malaria, and returned to the U.S. to be assistant manager of his father's company. Soon tiring of their mediocre vehicle, he shipped as a seaman for Buenos Aires. Employed for a time in Argentina, he then worked his way to South Africa and back on a cattle steamer, and after a period of beachcombing in Buenos Aires returned to New York. His last experience at sea followed, when he worked on ships between New York and Southampton. Next he tried acting during one of his father's tours, and reporting for a Connecticut newspaper, but suffered a physical breakdown and was sent to a sanatorium for six months. He had already written verses, and during this period of enforced rest and reflection turned to the drama as a medium for expressing the view of life he began to develop, based on his life at sea and among outcast and oppressed people in many places.

During the following winter (1913–14), he wrote his first play, The Web, seven other one‐act plays, and two long plays. He gained further experience as a student in G.P. Baker's 47 Workshop (1914–15), and spent a winter in Greenwich Village. In 1916 he became associated with the Provincetown Players, who during the next three years produced many of his one‐act plays, including Bound East for Cardiff (1916) and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918). This period of practical experiment brought to a climax his years of apprentice work, and he began to win general recognition when three of his plays were printed in The Smart Set. With the New York production of Beyond the Horizon (1920, Pulitzer Prize), O'Neill was acknowledged as the foremost creative American playwright.

Although he was associated with Robert Edmond Jones in managing the Greenwich Village Theatre (1923–27) and was a director of the Provincetown Players and a founder of the Theatre Guild, which produced his later plays, he became increasingly absorbed in writing, to the exclusion of other interests. He followed Beyond the Horizon with further naturalistic studies of tragic frustration set in modern American backgrounds: Chris Christopherson (1920), rewritten as Anna Christie (1921, Pulitzer Prize); Diff'rent (1920); Gold (1921); The Straw (1921); and The First Man (1922). From the same period came his achievements in symbolic expressionism, The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape(1922); but he continued the naturalistic approach in All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), and Desire Under the Elms (1924). In the same year he turned to the use of symbolic masks in a Provincetown production of Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, which he adapted and directed.

The romantic and poetic elements of his nature, which had hitherto appeared in details of his plays, dominated The Fountain (1925), an affirmation of life and spirit, and “the Eternal Becoming which is Beauty.” His next play, The Great God Brown (1926), fused symbolism, poetry, and the affirmation of a pagan idealism, in an ironic tragedy of modern materialism; and Lazarus Laughed (1927) and Marco Millions (1928) similarly attack the contemporary emphasis on acquisition and material standards, in terms of poetic emotion, exotic color, and satirical irony. Always an experimenter in forms, O'Neill attempted in Strange Interlude (1928, Pulitzer Prize) to create a dramatic technique using the stream‐of‐consciousness method, in a nine‐act tragedy of frustrated desires. This psychological analysis of motives was followed by a trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), adapting the Greek theme and preserving the dominant emotions of fear, horror, and a brooding sense of a malignant fate. O'Neill's deep interest in problems of religion in the modern world appears in two plays of this later period: Dynamo (1929), in which an electrical dynamo becomes a divine symbol, replacing the old God but destroying its worshippers; and Days Without End (1934), in which the hero is irresistibly attracted to Catholicism.

Ah, Wilderness! (1933) is a pleasant New England folk comedy, very different from O'Neill's usual concerns. The Iceman Cometh (1946) is a tragedy, realistically set in a Bowery bar, symbolically portraying the loss of illusion and the coming of Death. Long Day's Journey into Night (1956, Pulitzer Prize), an autobiographical tragedy written in 1940, and depicting a day in 1912 in the unhappy life of the Tyrone family, was the first of his posthumously produced and published plays. In 1958 came Hughie, a one‐act character study. Of his projected eleven‐play cycle, A Tale of Possessors Self‐Dispossessed, about the effect possessions had on an American family from the colonial era to the present day, two have been acted and issued: A Touch of the Poet (published 1957, produced 1958) and its immediate sequel, More Stately Mansions (1964).

O'Neill's works are deeply affected by his wide reading, especially in Greek tragedies, Ibsen, and Strindberg, but it is his own stage experience and his own insight into character that made them so distinguished and earned him a Nobel Prize (1936). His Poems, minor works, were collected in 1980, and “As Ever, Gene” (1980) assembled 130 letters to George Jean Nathan.

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

Paul Eugéne Louis Deschanel , 1855–1922, president of the French republic (1920); son of Émile Deschanel. A member of the chamber of deputies from 1885 and several times its president, he was chosen over Georges Clemenceau to succeed Raymond Poincaré as president of France. Ill health soon forced his resignation, and he was succeeded by Alexandre Millerand. Deschanel wrote many political works, notably Gambetta (1920) and La Question sociale (1898).