Eugene O'Neill
| Eugene O'Neill |
|---|
 Eugene O'Neill, American playwright
|
| Born |
| October 16, 1888 New York, New York |
| Died |
| November 27, 1953 Boston, Massachusetts |
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic Realism pioneered by the European playwright Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg into American theatre. Although he wrote one, highly succesful comedy Ah, Wilderness!, O'Neill was also famous for the bleak and tragic tone of his plays, which persistently examine the crushed hopes and dreams of the underprivileged. O'Neill is often considered to be the most influential American playwright of the 20th-century; just as Ibsen had done earlier, O'Neill revolutionized the conception of what acceptable drama could be. He was a relentless examiner of the hopes—and failings— of everyday American life, and he sought to present all the aspects of his characters' lives in his plays. As a reasult of this, O'Neill developed notoriety for shocking his audiences; but the overpowering literary merit of his plays holds up past all controversy. Like Balzac, O'Neill sought to capture, in his plays, a microcosm of all America. His works reveal to us the all-to-frequent failures of human tragedy, and in so doing redeems them, creating a testament, ultimately, to the triumph of the human spirit.
Life
Eugene O'Neill's life was intimately connected to New London, Connecticut. His father was an Irish-born stage actor named James O'Neill, who had grown up in impoverished circumstances. His mother, Ella Quinlan O'Neill, was the emotionally fragile daughter of a wealthy father who died when she was seventeen. O'Neill's mother never recovered from the death of her second son, Edmund, who had died of measles at the age of two, and she became addicted to morphine as a result of Eugene O'Neill's difficult birth.
O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room. Because of his father's profession, he spent his early years backstage at theatres and on trains as the family moved from place to place. When he was seven, O'Neill was sent to a Catholic boarding school where he found his only solace in books.
After being suspended from Princeton University for his frequent drinking, O'Neill spent several years as a sailor, during which time he suffered from depression and severe alcoholism. O'Neill lived for six years as a wanderer, working occasionally as a sailor and spending good lengths of time as an unemployed drifter in Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York. O'Neill would later jokingly refer to this time of his life as his "real education".
O'Neill briefly found employment during this period as a writer for the New London Telegraph and he dabbled in playwriting from time to time. It wasn't, however, until his experience at Gaylord Farms Sanatorium (where he was recovering from tuberculosis]]) that he experienced an epiphany and devoted his life to writing plays. O'Neill enrolled in the famous playwriting course taught by George Pierce Baker at Harvard University, and spent 1914-15 writing prolifically, though he would later disown all his writings from this period. In 1916 O'Neill had his first big break, when he joined the Provincetown Players, a raggedy band of young writers, artists, and actors who had assembled in the tiny coastal village of Provincetown. Although many other writers wrote plays for the company to perform, O'Neill soon became their biggest attraction. During this period O'Neill concentrated primarily on writing small, one-act plays that drew heavily from his experiences at sea. Bound East for Cardiff would become the most famous of these, and it would ultimately be O'Neill's first work to be performed in New York City to rave reviews.
Following the success of Bound East for Cardiff, O'Neill moved back to New York and became a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he also befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Party USA founder John Reed. In 1920 O'Neill first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway. O'Neill would win a Pulitzer Prize for the play, and soon after he had become a major literary celebrity. His productivity during this period was legendary; he wrote several plays a year, and obsessively revised earlier drafts of plays for reproduction. In 1929 O'Neill moved to the Loire Valley of northwest France, where he lived in the Chateau du Plessis in St. Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. Later, he moved to Danville, California in 1937 and lived there until 1944.
In 1943 O'Neill disowned his daughter, Oona for marrying the English actor/director/producer Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and he was 54. He never saw her again.
After suffering from multiple health problems (including alcoholism) over many years, O'Neill ultimately began to suffer from a severe tremor in his hands which made it impossible for him to write. He attempted to write via dictation, but found it impossible to compose by that method; O'Neill never wrote another play for the remaining ten years of his life.
O'Neill died from the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease in room 401 of the Shelton Hotel in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65 He was interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
Works
O'Neill's best-known plays include Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude (for which he again won the Pulitzer Prize), Mourning Becomes Electra, and his only comedy Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his own youth as he wished it had been. All of his plays tend to be marked by a darkness of tone—even his comic masterpiece Ah, Wilderness! verges dangerously close to becoming a tragedy—and a piercing degree of insight into the inner lives of his beleaguered characters. His late masterpiece The Iceman Cometh, produced in 1946, is often considered his masterpiece, directly addressing the issues of doubt and religion which had cropped up throughout his oeuvre.
Although his written instructions had stipulated that it not be made public until 25 years after his death, in 1956 O'Neill's wife arranged for his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night to be published, and produced on stage to tremendous critical acclaim; it is now considered to be his finest play. Other posthumously-published works include A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967). Both A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions were parts of a planned "dramatic epic" spanning 11 plays that would follow the life and times of a Boston family from the early 1800s to the present day. O'Neill wrote copious notes concerning the direction of the work, but the severe tremor in his hands prevented him from being able to complete anything other than these two fragments.
==Selected Works==*Bound East for Cardiff, 1916
- The Emperor Jones, 1920
- The Hairy Ape, 1922
- Anna Christie, 1922
- The Fountain, 1923
- Marco Millions 1923-1925
- Desire Under the Elms, 1925
- Lazarus Laughed, 1925-1926
- The Great God Brown, 1926
- Strange Interlude, 1928
- Dynamo, 1929
- Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931
- Ah, Wilderness!, 1933
- Days Without End, 1933
- The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, first performed 1946
- Long Day's Journey Into Night, written 1941, first performed 1956
- A Moon for the Misbegotten, 1943
- A Touch of the Poet, completed in 1942, first performed 1958
- More Stately Mansions, second draft found in O'Neill's papers, first performed 1967
- The Calms of Capricorn, published in 1983
Further reading
- Black, Stephen A. (2002). Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. Yale University press. ISBN 0300093993.
External links
- Works by Eugene O'Neill. Project Gutenberg
- Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site
- http://www.eoneill.com/
- American Experience - Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film on PBS
- Nobel autobiography
- Eugene O'Neill's Photo & Gravesite
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