| Birth: | Oct. 16, 1888 | | Death: | Nov. 27, 1953 | 
American playwright, the only one ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936). He was the son of matinee idol James O’Neill; their troubled relationship would be subtext for several of Eugene's later plays. Eugene was born in a New York hotel room while his father was appearing on stage. He attended boarding schools, had one year at Princeton, then spent six years as a merchant seaman, newspaper reporter, and, as he himself described it, waterfront derelict. Tuberculosis brought him to a sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he had what he called his “rebirth.” He decided the best way to exorcise his demons was to write plays. His early efforts, though awkward, dealt with the underside of American life: the prostitutes, sailors, and waterfront demimonde he knew so well from his travels, but which had, up to that point, been strictly the domain of “serious” novels, not the more “refined” domain of the stage. O’Neill’s first produced play, at the experimental Provincetown Playhouse in the artists' colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, was the one-act “Bound East for Cardiff.” His first first-length play, “Beyond the Horizon” (1920), won O’Neill the first of four Pulitzer Prizes; the others were for “Anna Christie” (1922), “Strange Interlude” (1928), and, his masterpiece, the devastatingly autobiographical “Long Day's Journey into Night” (written 1939-1941, produced posthumously in 1956). His other major works include “The Emperor Jones” (1920), “The Hairy Ape” (1922), “Desire Under the Elms” (1924); “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931), a transposition of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” trilogy to post-Civil War New England; “Ah, Wilderness” (1933), his only comedy (a kinder, gentler view of the early life that he later put under the microscope in “Long Day's Journey into Night”); and “The Iceman Cometh” (written 1939; produced 1946). O’Neill’s private life was as troubled as that of any of his characters: three times married, twice divorced; his son Eugene O’Neill, Jr., a classics professor at Yale, committed suicide in 1950 at age 40; his younger son Shane became a drug addict; his daughter Oona eloped with the much-older Charlie Chaplin at age 18 against her father’s wishes; and a type of Parkinson’s disease kept him mentally alert but physically helpless for the last three years of his life. He died as he was born, in a hotel room (in Boston). (bio by: Paul F. Wilson)
Search Amazon for Eugene O'Neill | | | Burial:
Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory
Jamaica Plain
Suffolk County
Massachusetts, USA |
Maintained by: Find A Grave
Record added: Jan 01, 2001
Find A Grave Memorial# 768 |
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