O'Neill, Eugene

O'Neill, Eugene (Gladstone)

(born Oct. 16, 1888, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Nov. 27, 1953, Boston, Mass.) U.S. playwright. The son of a touring actor, he spent an itinerant youth as a seaman, heavy drinker, and derelict, then began writing plays while recovering from tuberculosis (1912). His one-act Bound East for Cardiff (1916) was produced by the experimental Provincetown Players, which also staged his other early plays (1916–20). Beyond the Horizon was produced on Broadway in 1920, earning him his first Pulitzer Prize. Enormously prolific, he often wrote about tortured family relationships and the conflict between idealism and materialism. Soon recognized as a major dramatist, he became widely translated and produced. His many plays of the 1920s include The Emperor Jones (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), Anna Christie (1922; Pulitzer Prize), Desire Under the Elms (1925), The Great God Brown (1926), and Strange Interlude (1928; Pulitzer Prize). Among his later plays are Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Ah! Wilderness (1933; his only comedy), The Iceman Cometh (1946), and the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night (produced 1956; Pulitzer Prize), considered his masterpiece. O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, the first U.S. playwright so honoured.

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O'Neill, Eugene (Gladstone) (1888–1953) playwright; born in New York City. The son of actor James O'Neill, he toured with his father when young, and studied at Princeton (1906–07) and Harvard (1914–15). He worked as an assistant stage manager for his father (1910), as a sailor and laborer in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1910–11), and as an actor (1912). While spending time in a sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis (1912), he began to write the plays that made him an icon of American theater. Beginning in 1916, he was associated with the Provincetown Players, where many of his early plays were produced. A restless man, plagued by depression and an illness later diagnosed as Parkinson's disease, he lived in various locations, including New York City, California, and Boston. He wrote passionate works that were derived from his own obsessions, pain, and spiritual quest, such as Desire Under the Elms (1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), The Iceman Cometh (1946), and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956), among many other important works. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936.