Eugene O'Neill | About Eugene O'Neill | American Masters | PBS Comments Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity. O’Neill’s disdain for the commercial realities of the theater world he was born into led him to produce works of importance and integrity. Born in a hotel on Broadway in 1888, Eugene O’Neill was the son of Ella Quinlan and the actor James O’Neill. Eugene spent the first seven years of his life touring with his father’s theater company. These years introduced O’Neill to the world of theater and the difficulties of maintaining artistic integrity. His father, once a well-known Shakespearean, had taken a role in a lesser play for its sizable salary. O’Neill spent the next seven years receiving a strict Catholic education before attending a private secular school in Connecticut. Though a bright student, he was already caught up in a world of alcohol and prostitutes by the time he entered college. He eventually dropped out before finishing his first year at Princeton University. Though he would later enroll in a short class in playwriting at Harvard, this was the end of his formal education.

After leaving Princeton, O’Neill moved to New York, where he spent most of his time drinking and carousing with his older brother. In 1910 he fell in love with and married the first of three wives, Kathleen Jenkins. Soon after, however, O’Neill left his wife for the adventures of traveling. In Honduras he contracted Malaria, and returned to find Kathleen pregnant with his child. Without seeing the boy (Eugene O’Neill, Jr.), O’Neill shipped out again, this time for Buenos Aires, and later for England. In 1912, Kathleen filed for divorce and soon after, plagued by illness, O’Neill returned to his parents’ home. It was there among the turmoil of a despondent father and a morphine-addicted mother that he decided to become a playwright. O’Neill spent the next five years working primarily on one-act plays. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and with her had two children, Shane and Oona. He continued to publish and produce his one-acts, but it was not until his play “Beyond the Horizon” (1920), that American audiences responded to his genius.

The play won the first of three Pulitzer Prizes for O’Neill. Many saw in this early work a first step toward a more serious American theater. O’Neill’s poetic dialogue and insightful views into the lives of the characters held his work apart from the less sober playwriting of the day. Following the success of “Beyond the Horizon”, O’Neill went into an incredibly productive period, writing many of his greatest plays. “The Emperor Jones” (1920) and “The Hairy Ape” (1922) follow the lives of two men through personal struggles and their search for identity. Received well, these two established O’Neill as a master of the craft. The times, however, were fraught with turmoil—seeing the death of O’Neill’s father, mother, and brother, as well as the break-up of his marriage. Despite (or because) of these tragedies, he went on to create a number of penetrating and insightful views into family life and struggle.

With plays such as “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) and “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931), O’Neill uses the moral and physical entanglements similar to Greek drama to express the complexities of family life. Throughout much of the 1930s and 1940s, O’Neill continued in this vein working on a cycle of plays (nine) which would deal with lives of a New England family. Concerned that they might be altered after his death, O’Neill eventually destroyed the manuscripts, accidentally leaving behind only one, “A Touch of the Poet.” O’Neill’s final years were spent estranged from much of the literary community and his family. Though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936, most of his later works were not produced until after his death. His failing health did not prevent him, however, from writing two of the greatest works the American stage has ever seen.

Both “The Iceman Cometh”, a story of personal desperation in the lives a handful of barflys, and “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” a view into the difficult family life of his early years, were profound insights into many of the darker questions of human existence. Produced posthumously, these were to be his two greatest achievements. By the time of his death in 1953, O’Neill was considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. What did you think? SparkNotes: Long Day's Journey into Night: Context Long Day's Journey into Night Eugene O'Neill Table of Contents Summary Long Day's Journey into Night is one of Eugene O'Neill's later plays. He wrote it for his wife on the occasion of their 12th wedding anniversary in 1940. The play was written in part as a way for O'Neill to show the world what his family was like and in what sort of environment he was raised. O'Neill wanted to create a play that would lay forth his own background in a forgiving nature, which is why he strove not to bias the play against any one character.

The drama is very similar to O'Neill's family situation as a young man, but more importantly, it has become a universal play representing the problems of a family that cannot live in the present, mired in the dark recesses of a bitter, troubled past. Because of its deeply personal nature, O'Neill requested that the play be published posthumously, which meant that the play was not revealed to the world until O'Neill's death in 1956. To be sure, O'Neill has always been seen as one of the greatest American playwrights. He was the only American dramatist to be awarded the Nobel Prize, an honor not bestowed upon either Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, two other great American playwrights. He won the Pulitzer Prize for four plays, including Long Day's Journey into Night. His other best known plays are The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah Wilderness!, Strange Interlude, and The Hairy Ape. O'Neill was a huge Broadway success during his own adult life. For information on what his childhood was like, one does best to read Long Day's Journey into Night and examine the character of Edmund, who is partly autobiographical.

O'Neill was the son of a Broadway actor and a mother who disliked Broadway. He suffered from tuberculosis, which caused him to have a nervous breakdown early in life. He was born in 1888, but he did not achieve success as a playwright until his 30th play, Beyond the Horizon, appeared in 1920. Around the same time, his father died, which devastated O'Neill, who had admired his father tremendously despite their differences. After achieving success in 1920, O'Neill remained a dominant figure of American theater throughout his life. He had numerous personal problems, including failed marriage, but he was most captivated by his troubles and experiences growing up, before he found fame. The early part of his life is the subject of Long Day's Journey into Night, which will forever remain O'Neill's goodbye to the world--the play that showed America who O'Neill was and where he came from. Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site Now Open 5 Days A Week - Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service) Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site Now Open 5 Days A Week Contact: Tad Shay , 925-228-8860 Ext.

6422 “You can't be too careful about work. It's the most dangerous habit known to medical science.” Eugene O’Neill, “The Iceman Cometh” Join National Park Service rangers in the re-opening of Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site in Danville, CA. Reduced days of week operation are over! We are now open four days a week for free; 2 hour reserved guided tours at 10 AM & 2 PM on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Call 925-838-0249, ext. 6320 to leave your reservation request. “No Reservation Saturdays” continues at Eugene O’Neill NHS with free self-guided tours of Tao house. Visitors are picked up on Saturdays in front of the Museum of the San Ramon Valley, located at 205 Railroad Ave., Danville. An NPS shuttle picks up visitors three times on Saturday, at 10:15 AM, 12:15 PM, & 2:15 PM. With the exception of Saturdays, reservations are required to visit the site.

Please call the Eugene O’Neill NHS visitor center at 925-838-0249, ext. 6422, if you have questions. For more information, please visit the park website at . Eugene O'Neill, the only American playwright to win both the Nobel Prize for Literature and four Pulitzer Prizes, made Danville, CA his home from 1937 -1944. O’Neill dedicated his time to his craft and transformed his past into the autobiographical plays that made him America's most important playwright. O'Neill wrote 61 plays in a career spanning three decades, but it was at Tao House that Eugene wrote his final and most significant plays: "The Iceman Cometh," "Long Days Journey Into Night," and "A Moon For the Misbegotten." Eugene Gladstone O'Neill: A Short Biography b. Oct. 16, 1888, New York, N.Y., U.S. d. Nov. 27, 1953, Boston, Mass. in full EUGENE GLADSTONE O'NEILL foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.

His masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946). Early life O'Neill was born into the theatre. His father, James O'Neill, was a successful touring actor in the last quarter of the 19th century whose most famous role was that of the Count of Monte Cristo in a stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas pï¿½re novel. His mother, Ella, accompanied her husband back and forth across the country, settling down only briefly for the birth of her first son, James, Jr., and of Eugene. Eugene, who was born in a hotel, spent his early childhood in hotel rooms, on trains, and backstage. Although he later deplored the nightmare insecurity of his early years and blamed his father for the difficult, rough-and-tumble life the family led--a life that resulted in his mother's drug addiction--Eugene had the theatre in his blood.

He was also, as a child, steeped in the peasant Irish Catholicism of his father and the more genteel, mystical piety of his mother, two influences, often in dramatic conflict, which account for the high sense of drama and the struggle with God and religion that distinguish O'Neill's plays. O'Neill was educated at boarding schools--Mt. St. Vincent in the Bronx and Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn. His summers were spent at the family's only permanent home, a modest house overlooking the Thames River in New London, Conn. He attended Princeton University for one year (1906-07), after which he left school to begin what he later regarded as his real education in "life experience." The next six years very nearly ended his life. He shipped to sea, lived a derelict's existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York City, submerged himself in alcohol, and attempted suicide. Recovering briefly at the age of 24, he held a job for a few months as a reporter and contributor to the poetry column of the New London Telegraph but soon came down with tuberculosis.

Confined to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium in Wallingford, Conn., for six months (1912-13), he confronted himself soberly and nakedly for the first time and seized the chance for what he later called his "rebirth." He began to write plays. Entry into theatre O'Neill's first efforts were awkward melodramas, but they were about people and subjects--prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors, God's injustice to man--that had, up to that time, been in the province of serious novels and were not considered fit subjects for presentation on the American stage. A theatre critic persuaded his father to send him to Harvard to study with George Pierce Baker in his famous playwriting course. Although what O'Neill produced during that year (1914-15) owed little to Baker's academic instruction, the chance to work steadily at writing set him firmly on his chosen path. O'Neill's first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916, in the quiet fishing village of Provincetown, Mass., where a group of young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre.

In their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act sea play Bound East for Cardiff. The talent inherent in the play was immediately evident to the group, which that fall formed the Playwrights' Theater in Greenwich Village. Their first bill, on Nov. 3, 1916, included Bound East for Cardiff--O'Neill's New York debut. Although he was only one of several writers whose plays were produced by the Playwrights' Theater, his contribution within the next few years made the group's reputation. Between 1916 and 1920, the group produced all of O'Neill's one-act sea plays, along with a number of his lesser efforts. By the time his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920, at the Morosco Theater, the young playwright already had a small reputation. Beyond the Horizon impressed the critics with its tragic realism, won for O'Neill the first of four Pulitzer prizes in drama--others were for Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Day's Journey into Night--and brought him to the attention of a wider theatre public.

For the next 20 years his reputation grew steadily, both in the United States and abroad; after Shakespeare and Shaw, O'Neill became the most widely translated and produced dramatist. Period of the major works O'Neill's capacity for and commitment to work were staggering. Between 1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays--several of them double and triple length--and a number of shorter ones. He wrote and rewrote many of his manuscripts half a dozen times before he was satisfied, and he filled shelves of notebooks with research notes, outlines, play ideas, and other memoranda. His most-distinguished short plays include the four early sea plays, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees, which were written between 1913 and 1917 and produced in 1924 under the overall title S.S. Glencairn; The Emperor Jones (about the disintegration of a Pullman porter turned tropical-island dictator); and The Hairy Ape (about the disintegration of a displaced steamship coal stoker).

O'Neill's plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his family's tragic relationships--his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at all three. Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, perhaps the classic American example of the ancient "harlot with a heart of gold" theme; it became an instant popular success. O'Neill's serious, almost solemn treatment of the struggle of a poor Swedish-American girl to live down her early, enforced life of prostitution and to find happiness with a likable but unimaginative young sailor is his least-complicated tragedy. He himself disliked it from the moment he finished it, for, in his words, it had been "too easy." The first full-length play in which O'Neill successfully evoked the starkness and inevitability of Greek tragedy that he felt in his own life was Desire Under the Elms. Drawing on Greek themes of incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, he framed his story in the context of his own family's conflicts.

This story of a lustful father, a weak son, and an adulterous wife who murders her infant son was told with a fine disregard for the conventions of the contemporary Broadway theatre. Because of the sparseness of its style, its avoidance of melodrama, and its total honesty of emotion, the play was acclaimed immediately as a powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among the great American plays of the 20th century. In The Great God Brown, O'Neill dealt with a major theme that he expressed more effectively in later plays--the conflict between idealism and materialism. Although the play was too metaphysically intricate to be staged successfully in 1926, it was significant for its symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation with expressionistic dialogue and action--devices that since have become commonly accepted both on the stage and in motion pictures. In spite of its confusing structure, the play is rich in symbolism and poetry, as well as in daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avant-garde movements in American theatre. O'Neill's innovative writing continued with Strange Interlude.

This play was revolutionary in style and length: when first produced, it opened in late afternoon, broke for a dinner intermission, and ended at the conventional hour. Techniques new to the modern theatre included spoken asides or soliloquies to express the characters' hidden thoughts. The play is the saga of Everywoman, who ritualistically acts out her roles as daughter, wife, mistress, mother, and platonic friend. Although it was innovative and startling in 1928, its obvious Freudian overtones have rapidly dated the work. One of O'Neill's enduring masterpieces, Mourning Becomes Electra, represents the playwright's most complete use of Greek forms, themes, and characters. Based on the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, it was itself three plays in one.

To give the story contemporary credibility, O'Neill set the play in the New England of the Civil War period, yet he retained the forms and the conflicts of the Greek characters: the heroic leader returning from war; his adulterous wife, who murders him; his jealous, repressed daughter, who avenges him through the murder of her mother; and his weak, incestuous son, who is goaded by his sister first to matricide and then to suicide. Following a long succession of tragic visions, O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, appeared on Broadway in 1933. Written in a lighthearted, nostalgic mood, the work was inspired in part by the playwright's mischievous desire to demonstrate that he could portray the comic as well as the tragic side of life. Significantly, the play is set in the same place and period, a small New England town in the early 1900s, as his later tragic masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night. Dealing with the growing pains of a sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah, Wilderness!

was characterized by O'Neill as "the other side of the coin," meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have been, rather than what he believed it to have been (as dramatized later in Long Day's Journey into Night). The Iceman Cometh, the most complex and perhaps the finest of the O'Neill tragedies, followed in 1939, although it did not appear on Broadway until 1946. Laced with subtle religious symbolism, the play is a study of man's need to cling to his hope for a better life, even if he must delude himself to do so. Even in his last writings, O'Neill's youth continued to absorb his attention. The posthumous production of Long Day's Journey into Night brought to light an agonizingly autobiographical play, one of O'Neill's greatest. It is straightforward in style but shattering in its depiction of the agonized relations between father, mother, and two sons.

Spanning one day in the life of a family, the play strips away layer after layer from each of the four central figures, revealing the mother as a defeated drug addict, the father as a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father, the older son as a bitter alcoholic, and the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth with only the slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival. O'Neill's tragic view of life was perpetuated in his relationships with the three women he married--two of whom he divorced--and with his three children. His elder son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (by his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins), committed suicide at 40, while his younger son, Shane (by his second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life of emotional instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton), was cut out of his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was O'Neill's age. Until some years after his death in 1953, O'Neill, although respected in the United States, was more highly regarded abroad.

Sweden, in particular, always held him in high esteem, partly because of his publicly acknowledged debt to the influence of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose tragic themes often echo in O'Neill's plays. In 1936 the Swedish Academy gave O'Neill the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first time the award had been conferred on an American playwright. O'Neill's most ambitious project for the theatre was one that he never completed. In the late 1930s he conceived of a cycle of 11 plays, to be performed on 11 consecutive nights, tracing the lives of an American family from the early 1800s to modern times. He wrote scenarios and outlines for several of the plays and drafts of others but completed only one in the cycle--A Touch of the Poet--before a crippling illness ended his ability to hold a pencil. An unfinished rough draft of another of the cycle plays, More Stately Mansions, was published in 1964 and produced three years later on Broadway, in spite of written instructions left by O'Neill that the incomplete manuscript be destroyed after his death. O'Neill's final years were spent in grim frustration.

Unable to work, he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as any he had created for the stage. Assessment O'Neill was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could take its place with the best in American fiction, painting, and music. Until his Beyond the Horizon was produced, in 1920, Broadway theatrical fare, apart from musicals and an occasional European import of quality, had consisted largely of contrived melodrama and farce. O'Neill saw the theatre as a valid forum for the presentation of serious ideas. Imbued with the tragic sense of life, he aimed for a contemporary drama that had its roots in the most powerful of ancient Greek tragedies--a drama that could rise to the emotional heights of Shakespeare.

For more than 20 years, both with such masterpieces as Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and The Iceman Cometh and by his inspiration to other serious dramatists, O'Neill set the pace for the blossoming of the Broadway theatre. (B.Ge.) (A.Ge.) ï¿½ 1999-2000 Britannica.com and Encyclopï¿½dia Britannica, Inc. Copyright ï¿½ 1999-2016 eOneill.com Eugene O'Neill Dies of Pneumonia; Playwright, 65, Won Nobel Prize Eugene O'Neill Dies of Pneumonia; Playwright, 65, Won Nobel Prize Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES Boston, Nov. 27--Eugene O'Neill, noted American playwright whose prolific talents had brought to him both Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, died today of bronchial pneumonia. His age was 65. The announcement of the death was made by Dr. Harry L. Kozol of Boston. Mr. O'Neill had been ill for several years with Parkinson's disease, a form of palsy that made writing virtually impossible.

The writer had been in and out of various hospitals in eastern Massachusetts in recent years, but had sought to keep the visits unpublicized. Mr. O'Neill died in a Boston apartment where he had been living recently. His third wife, Carlotta Monterey, and Dr. Kozol were at the bedside. He also leaves a daughter, Oona O'Neill, who resides with her husband, Charles Chaplain, the actor, in Lucerne, Switzerland, and London. The funeral will be private. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was generally regarded as the foremost American playwright, his achievements in the theatre overwhelming those of his ablest contemporaries. Whatever judgment posterity may make, the history of the stage will have to find an important niche for him, for he came upon the scene at an opportune moment and remained active long after the American theatre had come of age. In the words of Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, Mr. O'Neill broke a number of old molds, shook up the drama as well as audiences and helped to transform the theatre into an art seriously related to life. The genius of Mr. O'Neill lay in raw boldness, in the elemental strength of his attack upon outworn concepts of destiny.

The playwright received the Pulitzer Prize on three occasions and was the second citizen of this country to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The author of some thirty-eight plays, most of them grim dramas in which murder, disease, suicide and insanity are recurring themes, Mr. O'Neill was in recent years too wracked by illness to write and lived a secluded life in a little house by the sea with his third wife, a former actress. But the decline of his fortunes saw no loss of public interest in his works. His plays continued to be produced to acclaim here and abroad and the fall of 1951 saw a real O'Neill "revival" on Broadway. The American National Theatre and Academy scheduled his "Desire Under the Elms" to launch its new season and the Craftsmen, a small dramatic group, produced the same play at the Barbizon-Plaza Theatre. In addition, the New York City Theatre Company played "Anna Christie" as the second offering of its winter season. A revival of "Ah, Wilderness!," the playwright's nostalgic comedy of first love, found its way to the television screen when the Celanese Theatre offered it, with Thomas Mitchell in the role originated by the late George M. Cohan.

Had International Audience Actually, no modern playwright except the late George Bernard Shaw had been more widely produced than Mr. O'Neill. He was as well known in Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Vienna, Mexico City, Calcutta and Budapest as in New York. There was as much color and excitement in his early life as there was in his plays. Indeed, much of his success was attributable to the fact that he had lived in and seen the very world from which he drew his dramatic material. As a young man he spent his days as a common sailor and his nights in dives that lined the water's edge. Out of these experiences came such plays as "The Hairy Ape," "Anna Christie" and "Beyond the Horizon," all of which have had a lasting life in the theatre. Mr. O'Neill was born on Oct. 16, 1888, in a third-floor room of the Barrett House, a family hotel that used to stand at Forty-third Street and Broadway. His father was the James O'Neill who starred for so many years in "The Count of Monte Cristo." His mother was the former Ellen Quinlan, who was born in New Haven but was reared in the Middle West.

The first seven years of Eugene's life were spent trouping up and down the country with his actor-father and housewife-mother. The boy's days as a theatrical camp follower ended at his eighth birthday, when he was enrolled in a Roman Catholic boarding school on the Hudson. In 1902, when he was 13, he entered Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn., considered at the time one of the leading boys' schools in New England. He was graduated in 1906 and went to Princeton. After ten months at the university, he was expelled for heaving a brick through a window of the local stationmaster's house. It marked the end of his formal education. The youth got a job as a secretary in a New York supply company business but quit after a few months to go to Honduras with a young mining engineer named Stevens. The two spent several months exploring the country's endless jungles and tried their hand at prospecting for gold. The venture ended after Mr. O'Neill became ill with fever and was shipped home by a kindly consul.

Worked for His Father For a time the young man worked as an assistant stage manager for his father, who was touring in a play called "The White Sister." But he soon succumbed to the lure of far-off places and shipped as an ordinary seaman on a Norwegian freighter bound for Buenos Aires. This began his acquaintance with the forecastle that was to stand him in good dramatic stead later on. In Buenos Aires he took such jobs as came his way. Tiring of that, he shipped again, this time for Portuguese East Africa. From there he sailed right back to Buenos Aires, then worked his way to New York on an American ship. In New York he lived at a waterfront dive known as "Jimmy the Priest's," and incidentally acquired the locale for "Anna Christie." For a time he joined his father's troupe as an actor of bit parts. Later he turned up at his father's summer place in New London, Conn. In August, 1912, he went to work as a reporter on The New London Telegraph. His newspaper career lasted for four months, because, as he readily admitted, he was more interested in writing verse, swimming and sunbathing than in gathering news.

Just before Christmas in 1912 he developed a mild case of tuberculosis and was sent to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium at Wallingford, Conn. He spent five months there and was to say later that it was while at the sanitarium that his mind got a chance to "establish itself, to digest and to evaluate the impressions of many past years in which one experience had crowded on another with never a second's reflection." At Gaylord, too, he began to read Strindberg. "It was reading his plays," Mr. O'Neill later recalled, "that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theatre myself." After his discharge from the sanitarium he boarded with a private family in New London for fifteen months. During this period he wrote eleven one-act plays and two long ones. He tore up all but six of the one-acters. His father paid to have five of the six short plays printed in a volume called "Thirst," published in 1914 and now a collector's item. Studied at Harvard The elder O'Neill also paid a year's tuition for his son at Prof.

George Baker's famous playwriting course at Harvard. The year over, Mr. O'Neill returned to New York and settled down in a Greenwich Village rooming house. The young man proceeded to soak up more "local color" at various Village dives, among them a saloon known as "The Working Girls' Home," where John Masefield, the British poet, was for a time a bartender. Mr. O'Neill lived in the Village until 1916, when he moved to Provincetown, Mass., and fell in with a group conducting a summer theatrical stock company known as the Wharf Theatre. He hauled out a sizable collection of unproduced and unpublished plays and one of them, a one-acter called "Bound East for Cardiff," was put into rehearsal. It marked Mr. O'Neill's debut as a dramatist. The Wharf Theatre did not go out of business at summer's end but set up shop in New York and called itself the Provincetown Players, a name that was to become famous. The company produced more of Mr. O'Neill's plays and the budding playwright began to be talked about in theatrical circles farther afield.

At about the same time, as well, three of his one-act plays, "The Long Voyage Home," "Ile" and "The Moon of the Carribbees," were published in the magazine Smart Set. In 1918 Mr. O'Neill went to Cape Cod to live, occupying a former Coast Guard station on a lonely spit of land three miles from Provincetown. He started working on longer plays and, in 1920, had his first big year when he won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes for "Beyond the Horizon." The play marked Mr. O'Neill's first appearance on Broadway. The other prize winners were "Anna Christie" in 1922 and "Strange Interlude" in 1928. Ranked as Money Maker "Beyond the Horizon" established Mr. O'Neill not only as a ranking playwright but as a money maker. The play ran for 111 performances and grossed $117,071. Mr. O'Neill needed the royalties badly; he had to use the $1,000 Pulitzer Prize money to pay off some debts.

The Theatre Guild began producing his plays with "Marco Millions" in 1927 and staged all his plays thereafter. At least three of the plays, "Mourning becomes Electra," "Strange Interlude" and "The Iceman Cometh," marked a new departure--they ran from four to five hours in length, requiring odd curtain and intermission times. Mr. O'Neill's dramas ranged from simple realism to the most abstruse symbolism but one play-- "Ah, Wilderness!"--was more in the tradition of straight entertainment and was interspersed with sentiment usually lacking in his introspective analyses of human emotions. The play ran for 289 performances. Mr. O'Neill did not always meet with approval. At times, even, he was the object of bitter denunciation, especially from persons who believed his works smacked of immorality. By his choice of themes he several times stirred up storms that swept his plays into the courts. "All God's Chillun Got Wings," which figured in the headlines for weeks, was fought by New York authorities on the ground that it might lead to race riots.

"Desire Under the Elms" kicked up a big fuss in New York and almost was closed in the face of mounting protests. It never did open in Boston. The play was permitted to go on in Los Angeles, but after a few performances the police arrested everybody in the cast. "The Hairy Ape," which starred Louis Wolheim in the role of Yank, a powerful, primitive stoker, was one of the dramatist's most popular works. The play ran for ten weeks, went on the road for a long tour and later was popular abroad. "Electra" Highly Rated Many critics felt that "Mourning Becomes Electra," which opened on Oct. 26, 1931, and had fourteen acts, was Mr. O'Neill's greatest masterpiece. Mr.

Atkinson called it "heroically thought out and magnificently wrought in style and structure." John Mason Brown said that it was "an achievement which restores the theatre to its highest state" and Joseph Wood Krutch observed that "it may turn out to be the only permanent contribution yet made by the twentieth century to dramatic literature." After "Days Without End" was produced in 1934--a play that received scant praise and lasted only fifty-seven performances--Mr. O'Neill was not represented on Broadway again until 1946, when "The Iceman Cometh" was staged. In the intervening years, he settled in California and began the most ambitious project of his life- -a cycle of nine related plays dealing with the rise and fall of an American family from 1775 to 1932. The venture never came off. In 1936, he won the Nobel Prize but could not go to Stockholm to receive it because of an appendicitis operation. In a letter to the prize committee, Mr.

O'Neill said: "This highest of distinctions is all the more grateful to me because I feel so deeply that it is not only my work which is being honored but the work of all my colleagues in America--that the Nobel Prize is a symbol of the coming of age of the American theatre. "For my plays are merely, through luck of time and circumstance, the most widely known examples of the work done by American playwrights in the year since the World War--work that has finally made modern American drama, in its finest aspects, an achievement of which Americans can be justly proud." Play About His Family After "The Iceman Cometh," Mr. O'Neill wrote a play called "Long Day's Journey Into Night," which will not be produced until twenty-five years after his death. He refused to talk about it but he had shown the manuscript to a few friends, and it was reported that the play deals with his own family life. Mr. O'Neill was stricken with Parkinson's Disease, a palsy, about 1947. The disease caused his hands to jerk convulsively, making it impossible for him to write in longhand. He tried to compose a play by dictation but discovered he could not work that way.

Despite the infirmity, he remained in good spirits and displayed evidences of his wit when friends dropped in. The dramatist married the former Kathleen Jenkins in 1909, who bore him a son, Eugene O'Neill Jr. The son, who became a noted Greek scholar, committed suicide at Woodstock, N.Y., on Sept. 25, 1950. The first marriage ended in divorce in 1912, and six years later, Mr. O'Neill married the former Agnes Boulton. They were divorced in 1929. A son Shane, and Oona were born to this marriage. Mr. O'Neill married Miss Monterey on July 22, 1929. Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service) Contact Us The Beautiful Home and Engaging Story Of O'Neill America's only Nobel Prize winning playwright, Eugene O'Neill, chose to live in Northern California at the height of his writing career. Isolated from the world and within the walls of his home, O'Neill wrote his final and most memorable plays; The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

A Long Dark Journey into Light | Humanities A Long Dark Journey into Light By Janis Johnson | HUMANITIES, March/April 2006 | Volume 27, Number 2 In the late 1930s, American playwright Eugene O'Neill was at the height of his career: three Pulitzer Prizes, a Nobel Prize, accolades, and financial success. By 1956, his star had fallen and his most acclaimed works, written years after the prize ceremonies, were destined for oblivion. O'Neill had died in a Boston hotel in 1953, ostensibly determined to control what happened to his literary legacy. The terms of his will clearly expressed that , now regarded as one of the greatest American plays, never be performed. But his wife, Carlotta, defied his last wish over the objections of O'Neill's longtime publisher Bennett Cerf, and on November 7, 1956, the curtain rose on the first American production of Long Day's Journey into Night. When the final curtain fell, most members of the audience were in tears. "We came out to take our calls," recalled the late Jason Robards, then a relatively unknown actor: "Silence. . . .

And then it went--tremendous applause--everyone got on their feet. . . . the audience started to come to the stage. This is what I never had happen before or since. . . . They were all down, looking up, and we were standing there looking down into faces of people that we knew or we didn't know. It was very strange, but it was absolutely incredible." In the end, Long Day's Journey into Night would prove to be a watershed in American theater, reviving O'Neill's reputation and bringing him posthumously a fourth Pulitzer Prize. "This really was his resurrection year, and it's important to look back and think where we would have been without that play fifty years ago," says Ric Burns, director, cowriter, and coproducer of Eugene O'Neill, a two-hour documentary film scheduled for broadcast March 27 on PBS's American Experience. O'Neill, acknowledged as a storyteller "of unmitigated gloom," was a literary genius because of his "courage to reach back into his own past and realize it objectively," says Burns. "That is very hard to get to, and as members of the audience we recognize that. We feel tremendous moving identification and feel, 'you know what?

That's my family.'" O'Neill's other major works, such as The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten, "require the entire nervous system of a writer," Burns says. "He delved down into his own experience like an archaeologist. It took him a lifetime to access the tranquility to be able to do that." What is "exhilarating" about plays that are on the surface "profoundly bleak," says Burns, "is the affirming power of all great tragic art that says, 'I can look into the most horrific things and not turn to stone. I can confront reality without turning away from it.'" "I have an innate feeling of exultance about tragedy," O'Neill wrote. "What I am after is to get an audience to leave the theater with an exultant feeling from seeing somebody on the stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering, but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle." "It's catharsis," playwright Tony Kushner observes in the documentary. "And it leaves open the possibility that now something new can be born." Burns wrote Eugene O'Neill with Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill's biographers.

They tell the story of America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright within the context of his turbulent family relationships and the social, cultural, and personal upheavals that shaped him and his writing. The writers' single greatest challenge was to make the intensely dark O'Neill and his theatrical material lively and accessible in a television documentary. They achieved this by inviting in marquee actors--including Robards, Al Pacino, Liam Neeson, Christopher Plummer, Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, and Natasha Richardson--and giving them the material to grapple with on live camera. Some of the actors, such as Plummer, had never performed O'Neill. Knitting together the interpretive narrative are O'Neill specialists such as playwrights Kushner and John Guare. The documentary unfolds as a series of scenes from O'Neill's work mixed in with scholarly reflections, excerpts from letters and journals, newspaper accounts, and old photos and film. "In the theater, the suspense is heightened because the acting is happening in real time," says Burns.

"On film, we wanted to pare it away to the absolute essentials--the words the playwright wrote, the actor struggling with that and the audience listening in silence." Looking back, O'Neill's entire life seems to have gone into the making of Long Day's Journey into Night and the masterworks he wrote late in life. The roots of these works lay in his own turbulent circumstances and those of his parents, James and Ella, and his older brother, Jamie. They also lay in the excruciating vulnerability and irresistible inner drive that were the complex coordinates of O'Neill's own character. "In O'Neill," says Kushner, "there's this absolute, you know, sort of God-ordained mission, which is to keep searching, even if in the process he discovered that there is no God. It's a terrifying sort of mandate, but I also think it should be the mandate of all artists, and in a way, of all people." O'Neill was born in a hotel room in 1888, in the heart of what became Times Square. His father James was a matinee idol. His mother Ella was a shy convent girl who found herself madly in love with her husband but unable to adjust to the rootless acting life.

From the start, Eugene would be haunted by events that had taken place before his birth, particularly the death of his brother Edmund. The boy contracted measles at the age of four just after Ella reluctantly decided to join James on tour, and died before she was able to get back home. She never forgave herself. Soon after Eugene was born, Ella started taking morphine and became addicted. His oldest brother Jamie also never recovered from the psychological damage of Edmund's death and eventually became an alcoholic. O'Neill saw his parents' marriage descend into a nightmare of remorse and recrimination. With his father frequently away and his mother emotionally absent, the young Eugene took pleasure in reading and staring at the sea in his family's summer home in New London, Connecticut. He imagined that he could be as free as a seagull, according to Barbara Gelb. O'Neill was nearly fifteen, his own faith faltering, before he learned about his mother's addiction. He began his own aimless wandering, dreamed of going to sea and becoming a poet, drank recklessly and was thrown out of Princeton his first year for drinking too much and cutting classes. O'Neill married, had a son, then abandoned his family, set off to sea, and drank himself senseless.

On a freezing night in the winter of 1912, filled with hopelessness and shame , the twenty-three-year-old O'Neill swallowed a bottle of Veronal tablets in Jimmy the Priest's saloon at the foot of Manhattan and lay down to die. Instead, he lived. "That bar, which is so profoundly important in O'Neill's life . . . it's the place where he became a writer really," Kushner explains in the documentary. "That's where he hit the bottom. That's where he arrived at his own O'Neillian moment, and emerged." The next summer O'Neill declared, "I want to be an artist or nothing." Over the next six years he would teach himself to write plays, he would marry and start another family, and would see his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, open on Broadway. The first American tragedy, it changed the course of American theater-and won a Pulitzer Prize. Before O'Neill "there was no American theater," says Guare. "In America before World War I, there was a cultural resistance to theater dealing with serious things," says Burns. "After the carnage of the war, there was a tremendous reaction to the shallowness of Broadway.

O'Neill decided to be true to what he knew best--granite reality." Apprenticed during the bohemian heyday of Greenwich Village and Provincetown in the years before the war and emerging as a successful artist during the transformational social and political era afterwards, O'Neill introduced not only new forms and genres but new voices, including African Americans, women, and the working poor. He explored the hopes and dreams of sailors, prostitutes, alcoholics, criminals, fugitives, dreamers, madmen, and revolutionaries. "His theater changes as the times change, because he has a very profound understanding of the relationship between the life of the theater and the lives of society," Kushner says. Yet O'Neill always placed the family at the very center of the body politic in the imagination of American life, a position it holds today in many respects. "What O'Neill says, and what I think great art always tells us . . . is that . . . the personal is political. And that every family is also a microcosm of society," adds Kushner. Between 1920 and 1933, O'Neill dominated Broadway, writing eighteen new plays and seeing twenty-one of his works produced on and off Broadway.

He won two more Pulitzer Prizes. The works from this period include The Emperor Jones, Desire Under the Elms, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Elektra. During this heady period, he stopped drinking because he was told by psychiatrists that his brain would turn to the white of an egg, and O'Neill, a survivor above all else, knew that without writing he would die. He also left Agnes, his second wife, and their children Shane and Oona and took up with the woman who ultimately determined his theatrical fate. The beautiful Carlotta Monterey, who had grown up poor in Oakland as Hazel Tharsing, was an independent and volcanic personality who became his protector. In 1934, following the savagely negative reception of Days Without End, a meditation on his lost faith, O'Neill withdrew from Broadway, faced down a nervous breakdown, and eventually settled in the mountains east of San Francisco. There, in Tao House, he abandoned his plan to write a massive cycle of plays about the Irish in America and began the writing frenzy that would yield his last--and greatest plays--The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day's Journey into Night.

Two of the three were set in the year 1912, the year he attempted suicide. When O'Neill completed Long Day's Journey into Night in March 1941, he marked the occasion with a simple entry in his diary, "Like this play better than any I have ever written--does most with the least--a quiet play!--And a great one, I believe." O'Neill delivered the play to Carlotta on July 22, 1941, on their twelfth wedding anniversary. "Dearest," he wrote in the inscription, "I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play." The story takes place in one day in the harrowing life of a family--a father, mother, and two brothers, whom he called "the four haunted Tyrones." He directed that the play not be published until twenty-five years after his death and that it never be performed.

"He wanted to make sure it was never confused as merely autobiographical," says Burns. "But Carlotta was a genius in her own right. She understood she was going to protect his literary posterity at any cost even if it meant violating his will . . . And he knew she would do whatever she wanted . . . If the play hadn't been published, there's a real possibility that his reputation would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The culture owes her an enormous debt." Like King Lear, O'Neill's life was consumed by extraordinary tragedy. "If the plays hadn't been so good, we would say, what a waste . . . a nightmare of a man who destroyed his family at the expense of a career," Guare says. "But if we look at the disasters that he heaped on his wives and his children . . . you sure as hell don't want to be one of O'Neill's loved ones . . . But what he gave the rest of the world, what he gave us, why we're here today, that's the cost of that. And that's where we find the forgiveness . . . the way he's expanded our consciousness." For many people, Burns acknowledged, O'Neill has the reputation for being too complex to understand.

"The message," he says, "is to stick with it. O'Neill was uncompromising. He's often a workout, but he takes us to great places. It's the rare person who in his or her stunned silence at the end would want to go back to where they were when they walked in the door." About the Author Eugene O'Neill - Biography - IMDb Eugene O'Neill Biography Showing all 40 items Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (3) | Trivia (30) | Personal Quotes (1) | Salary (1) Overview (4) 5' 11" (1.8 m) Mini Bio (1) Eugene O'Neill, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered the greatest American playwright. No one, not Maxwell Anderson , Tennessee Williams , Arthur Miller , nor Edward Albee , approaches O'Neill in terms of his artistic achievement or his impact on the American theater. James O'Neill , one of the most popular actors of the late 19th century, was his father, so one could say that Eugene O'Neill was born to a life in the theater.

His father, who had been born into poverty in Ireland before emigrating to the United States, developed his craft and became a star in the theaters of the Midwest. He married Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan, the Irish-American daughter of a wealthy Cleveland businessman, whose death when she was a teenager had hurt her emotionally. She remained emotionally fragile throughout her life, a condition exacerbated by a further tragedy, the loss of a child. A further strain was placed on her when it was discovered that James had lived in "concubinage" with a common-law wife who later sued him for child support and alimony, claiming he had fathered her child. Both were pious and believing Catholics. They had three sons, including James Jr. (born 1878) and Edmund (1883), who died at the age of two from measles, leaving Ella distraught. Their last son, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (his middle name a salute to the British prime minister who was in favor of home rule for Ireland), was born at the Barrett Hotel (home of many theatrical artistes) in New York City, on October 16, 1888.

Supposedly, it was a difficult delivery, and in the spirit of the times, Ella was given morphine for her pain. She became an addict. James O'Neill made a fortune playing The Count of Monte Cristo, both on Broadway in multiple productions and as a touring show. However, he suffered an artistic death as a performing artiste through the sheer repetition of the Monte Cristo role, which he turned to repeatedly as it always proved a success. He reportedly played the role at least 4,000 times, perhaps nearly twice that number. He would provide the prototype for the character of James Tyrone, the pater familias in his son's "Long Day's Journey Into Night". James O'Neill Sr. knew that he had suffered artistically from his commercial instincts, and Eugene never forgot that. His son remained steadfast in his own fidelity to his principles of artistic integrity. The father also was a notorious skinflint, terrified that some unforeseen calamity would throw him back into the hellish poverty of his childhood in Ireland.

Both young Gene and his older brother Jamie tried their hands at acting, and though Jamie was more successful than Gene, he never developed a significant, independent career as a professional thespian due to instability caused by his alcoholism. Jamie relied on his father for work, which further fueled his drinking. Jamie was a full-blown alcoholic, just like his younger brother, Gene, and he drank himself to death at a relatively young age, a fate Gene managed to avoid, but not from lack of trying. The characters of Jamie in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and James Tyrone Jr. in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" were based on him. As a young man, Eugene suffered from tuberculosis, which likely exacerbated his propensity for pessimism (the stuff of his life became the guts of his last masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey Into Night"). His pessimistic, tragic outlook on life likely was hereditary: O'Neill's two sons, Eugene O'Neill Jr. and Shane O'Neill, became substance abusers as adults: Eugene Jr. was an alcoholic and Shane was a heroin addict. Both committed suicide. He disowned his daughter Oona Chaplin , for marrying Charles Chaplin , who was just six months younger than O'Neill himself.

He had never had much to do with her anyway, nor any of his children. His life was devoted to writing. After recovering from tuberculosis, O'Neill attended Princeton for the 1907-08 term, but was kicked out after his freshman year, allegedly for being drunk and disorderly at a reception held by the university president, future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson . For the next eight years he led a freebooting existence, fortune-hunting for gold in South America and plying the seas as an able-bodied seaman, while trying to drink himself to death (he even made an attempt at suicide). Eventually he returned to New York City and tried his hand at playwriting, and with the financial help of his father, studied playwriting at Harvard in 1915. His father was unimpressed by the results, and died the same year his son made his big breakthrough on Broadway (he did live to see the production of Eugene's first full-length play, "Beyond the Horizon", which opened on February 2, 1920 and ran for a then-impressive 111 performances, and its honoring with the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama that May. James O'Neill Sr.

died on August 10, 1920. His namesake, James O'Neill Jr., died three years later, at the age of 45.) Where Eugene truly learned his craft was in the writing of one-act melodramas that dealt with the lives of sailors, that were performed by the Provincetown Players, which had theaters in Provincetown on Cape Cod and off of Washington Square in New York City ( John Ford made a 1940 movie out of four of his sea plays, collected in The Long Voyage Home (1940)). The theater he created was a reaction against the theater of his father, the old hoary melodramas that packed them in for a night of crowd-pleasing entertainment. Eugene started out as a dramatist at a time when there was an average of 70 plays being performed on Broadway each week. The Great White Way resembled a modern movie multiplex in that potential theatergoers would peruse the various marquees in and around Times Square seeking an entertainment for the night. At the time O'Neill began to establish himself, in pre- and post-World War I era, entertainment was first and foremost in most people's minds.

The movies and O'Neill would change that. The competition of the more sophisticated movies of the late silent era, and then the talkies, usurped the position of Broadway and the theater as the premier venue for American entertainment. The light plays that were the equivalent of television fare became extinct. Musicals continued to thrive, as did comedies, but drama became more serious and developed a psychological depth. O'Neill was the midwife of the phenomenon. Eugene O'Neill helped foster the maturation of American drama, as he incorporated the techniques of both European expressionism and realism in his work. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg , brought to the American stage a tragic vision that influenced scores of American playwrights that followed. Eugene O'Neill died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1953. Allegedly, his last words were, "Born in a hotel room, and goddammit! Died in one!" His health had been hurt by his alcoholism and he suffered from Parkinson's disease-like tremors of his hands that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to write since the early 1940s.

It is believed that he suffered cerebellar cortical abiotrophy, a neurological disease in which certain neurons in the cerebellum of the brain die off, adversely affecting the balance and coordination of the sufferer. As a dramatist, he had flourished on Broadway from 1920, when his first full-length work, "Beyond the Horizon", debuted, winning him his first Pulitzer, until 1934, when his first and only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (debut October 1933) came to an end that June and his play, "Days Without End," was staged in repertory between January and November). After 1934, he entered a cocoon, staying away from Broadway until after World War II, when the 1946 production of "The Iceman Cometh" debuted. The first production of "Iceman" failed, and O'Neill's reputation suffered, but the 1956 production of "Iceman" starring Jason Robards and directed by José Quintero was a great success, as was the posthumous production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night", which brought O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer.

The two plays solidified his legend. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood Spouse (3) He left several unpublished plays and an autobiography. His will stipulated that these were not to be produced until 25 years after his death. Was awarded the 1936 Nobel prize in literature. Son of actor James O'Neill . Pictured on the $1.00 US postage stamp in the original Prominent Americans series, issued 16 October 1967. Daughter, with Agnes Boulton, Oona (born 1925). Son, with Agnes Boulton, Shane (born 1919). Son, with Kathleen Jenkins, Eugene Jr. (born 1910). Many consider him the father of the modern American theatre; most of his plays were brutally realistic. They were all completely free of the stilted, melodramatic, overwritten language used in American nineteenth-century melodramas, and which seems unintentionally hilarious to modern audiences. His style, in one way or another, influenced all American dramatists who were either his contemporaries or who came after him.

Great-grandfather of Dolores Chaplin , Carmen Chaplin , Aurélia Thiérrée , and James Thierrée . His play, Mourning Becomes Electra performed at the Royal National Theatre: Lyttelton, was awarded the 2004 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Revival of 2003. Was asked by MGM, in 1932, to write a screenplay for Jean Harlow , whom he did not admire, and to cable back his response in twenty words or less, collect. His response read thus: "No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. O'Neill." This incident was incorporated, almost verbatim, into Harold Robbins ' roman a clef on early Hollywood, "The Carpetbaggers.". Disowned and cut off communication from his daughter, Oona Chaplin , after she married Charles Chaplin , who was exactly six months his junior, in age. Won two Tony Awards in 1957 for "Long Day's Journey into Night:" as Best Author (Dramatic) and as author of the Best Play winner.

In 1959, he was also nominated as author of Best Play nominee "A Touch of the Poet." All of O'Neill's Tony recognition was posthumous. Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors." New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 338-348. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005. Born under the astrological sign of Libra. Though astrology does not overtly figure in his work, his personal library (now preserved at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) contained a book, "From Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars" by Evangeline Smith Adams (New York: Mead and Company, 1930) personally inscribed to him by the author. Was the 1936 Nobel Laureate in Literature, the second American so honored.

Won a record four Pulitzer Prizes for drama: in 1920, for Great Performances: Beyond the Horizon (1975); in 1921, for Anna Christie (1930); in 1928, for Strange Interlude (1932); and in 1956, posthumously, for Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962). Was expelled from Princeton University for throwing a beer bottle through the office window of the University's President. That was future United States President Woodrow Wilson . His play, "A Moon for the Misbegotten," was nominated for the 1973 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Play Production that was performed at the Academy Festival Theatre with Colleen Dewhurst and directed by George Keathley. His play, "A Moon for the Misbegotten," at the First Folio Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2009 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production of a Play-Midsize. Irish-American. His father James was a native of Kilkenny,Ireland.

His play, "The Iceman Cometh" at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was awarded the 2012 Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for Play Production (Large). His play, "The Iceman Cometh" in the University of California Center of for the Arts and Theatre Group production at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre in Los Angeles, California was awarded the 1986 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Distinguished Production. His play, "The Iceman Cometh," in Mark Taper Forum production at the James A. Doolittle Theatre at the University of California in Los Angeles, California was awarded the 1986 Drama Logue Award for Outstanding Production. His play, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the Court Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2016 Joseph Jefferson (Equity) Award for Large Play Production. Personal Quotes (1) Critics? I love every bone in their heads. Salary (1)

Question: Which American playwright wrote The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night?
Answer: (Eugene) O'Neill