Eugene O'Neill

     Eugene O'Neill was born in New York into an Irish-Catholic theatrical family. His early life was restless: his father, who was an actor, spent most of his career touring in the lead role of the popular melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo. In 1895 O'Neill was enrolled in the St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, and transferred in 1900 to the DeLa Salle Institute in Manhattan. During these years his mother's addiction to morphine left profound emotional scars on the growing O'Neill.

     Once he attempted suicide, overdosing in a flophouse. He stayed with his family in Connecticut, but was then forced by the onset of tuberculosis to spend six months in a sanatorium. After recovering O'Neill began writing plays. He was enrolled in George Pierce Baker's 47A Workshop at Harvard University (1914-1915), and then joined the Provincetown Players.
     In the late 1910s O'Neill dramas begun to gain recognition in New York. Between the years 1918 and 1924 he wrote among others Anna Christie, The First Man, The Hairy Ape, The Fountain, and Welded. In 1918 he married the writer Agnes Boulton; they had two children. O'Neill's father died in 1921 from cancer, next year he lost his mother, and twelve months after that his brother Jamies died from a stroke.
     During the early 1920s O'Neill formed with Robert Edmond Jones and Kenneth Macgowan, a gifted producer, a "Triumvirate" that ran the Experimental Theater at the Provincetown Playhouse. While still married to Agnes, O'Neill used the help of his friend Macgowan to send roses to the beautiful actress Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill's second marriage ended in 1929. In the same year he married Carlotta Monterey, with whom he first settled in France, then in Sea Island, Georgia, and finally in California. O'Neill saw his children infrequently. He disinherited his son Shane because he did not approve of his son's life style, and his daughter Oona, because at the age of eighteen she married Charles Chaplin.
     The Pulitzer winning Beyond the Horizon (pub. 1920) was O'Neill's first important play. The story depicts two brothers, Andrew, the elder a practical realist, and the younger, Robert, a poetic idealist. Robert is incapable of managing the family farm. When Andrew returns from a long voyage, successful and wealthy, he finds Robert dying of tuberculosis. On his deathbed, Robert still dreams of freedom beyond the horizon
     Mourning Becomes Electra, based on Aeschylus's Orestean trilogy, was O'Neill's version of the tragedy of the house of Atreus, set in 19th-century New England. The action centers around Lavinia (Electra). General Ezra Mannon, on his return from the American Civil war, is murdered by his wife Christine. Lavinia avenges her father's murder by persuading her brother, Orin (Orestes), to kill her mother's lover. The murder is followed by the suicide of the mother. Orin goes mad when he discovers that he has an incestuous passion for his sister. Lavinia locks herself in the family mansion, surrounded by the ghosts of the past.
     In 1935 O'Neill began work on a cycle of eleven plays, with the theme of the turmoils of American materialism. The cycle was never completed - only two plays have survived. On his final productive period O'Neill wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, an agonized portrait of his own family, the Tyrones in the play. Again the action takes place in one room. Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction: "None of us can help the things life has done to us" says Mary. Edmund, based on the author himself, is stricken with tuberculosis. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Hughie (pub. 1959) was a story about a small time gambler, and A Moon for the Misbegotten (pub. 1952) continued O'Neill's family history of the Tyrones.
     The Iceman Cometh is perhaps the finest of O'Neill's tragedies. The story is set in a dockside bar on the lower west side of New York City. It concerns a group of drunken derelicts who spend their time in the back room of Henry Hope's saloon where they discuss their hopeless lives. One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician. Their daily routines are shattered when Hickey, a salesman and the son of a preacher, appears as a messiah, and encourages them to start rehabilitation. They find out that their new hero is himself a madman and murderer, who has killed his wife, and lapse once more into their comfortable world of whiskey.
     Poor health prevented O'Neill from attending the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden. His remaining creative years were characterized by long periods of illness. After a failed production of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943, he wrote no major new plays. O'Neill became gradually paralyzed and he died on November 27, 1953 in Boston. He wrote 45 plays.
     Eugene O’ Neill, an American dramatist, who is internationally reputed in the field of drama, also got the noble prize in 1936. He was influenced by Henric Ibsen, August Strindberg and Maurice Maeterlinck. He is remembered for realist, naturalist and expressionist drama. Moreover the credit goes to Eugene O’Neill for his realist and naturalistic play. Before O’Neill in American theater, there were melodrama which were sentimental and having the sense of excitement.
    But when O’ Neill came with the philosophical subject matter , he became out of reach from the audience, because he got the subject matter from ancient Greek time and mix it with Freudian psychoanalysis.For example Desire Under the Elms is completely realistic drama set in 19 th century New England (America). Its theme is sexual desire and the desire of land. O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh is very much philosophical and gloomy play that was staged in Broadway in 1946. It was not much liked by audience. It became only popular in off Broadway in the year 1956. Another finest play of O’Neill is Long Day’s Journey in to Night (1956) is considered by many critics to be a triumph of realistic drama and O’Neill’s finest play. It is about human responsibility and love-hate with in a family.