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Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (New York City,
October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953 in Boston) was an American
playwright. More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the
dramatic realism pioneered by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg into
American drama. Generally, his plays involve characters who inhabit the
fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and
aspirations but ultimately slide into dillusionment and despair.
Although O'Neill was born in New York City,
his early life was intimately connected to New London, Connecticut. His
father was stage actor James O'Neill, who had owned property in New
London before Eugene's birth. His mother was addicted to morphine. As an
adult, O'Neill was employed by the New London Telegraph, and wrote his
first plays while living there. (Connecticut College maintains an
O'Neill archive and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. Waterford fosters
the development of new plays under his name.) In 1929 he moved to the
Loire Valley of northwest France, where he lived in the Chateau du
Plessis in St. Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. He moved to Danville,
California in 1937 and resided there until 1944. His home there, known
as Tao House, is today the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site.
O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the
Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, including the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His best-known plays include Desire Under the
Elms, Strange Interlude (for which he again won the Pulitzer Prize),
Mourning Becomes Electra, and his career's only comedy Ah, Wilderness!,
a wistful re-imagining of his own youth as he wished it had been. In
1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. After a ten-year pause,
O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The
following year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and would not gain
recognition and placement among his best works until decades later.
Carlotta Monterey was O'Neill's third wife.
The aging dramatist renounced his daughter Oona for marrying Charlie
Chaplin when she was only 18 years old (Chaplin was one year her
father's junior).
In 1953, O'Neill died in the Sheraton Hotel
in Boston, a building which is currently used by Boston University as
Shelton Hall dormitory. Inside Shelton Hall there is a plaque dedicated
to O'Neill and the 7th floor where he died is now the Writer's Corridor.
He was interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain,
Massachusetts.
In 1956, three years after O'Neill's death,
his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night was
published and produced on stage. His other posthoumously published plays
were A Touch of the Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).
Selected Works
Beyond the Horizon, 1920
The Hairy Ape, 1922
Anna Christie, 1922
Desire Under the Elms, 1925
Strange Interlude, 1928
Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931
Ah, Wilderness!, 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
****
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