Eugene O'Neill
Throughout cultural history, there have been artists who defined a nation’s theatrical art: Shakespeare for England, Goethe for Germany, de Vega for Spain, Racine for France, and Eugene O’Neill for America. Born in 1888, O’Neill’s father, James, was a popular actor who was often on the road touring productions. When Eugene was very young he, too, would make the traveling theatre circuit, and later spent some time working for his father. He left Princeton University to travel on his own. Although he had to return from Honduras because of contracting malaria, O'Neill continued to set out for more journeys by sea. In 1912, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis and began to write plays. Three years later he took classes at Harvard with George Pierce Baker, who was America’s first professor to teach dramatic art. The following year, O’Neill joined the Provincetown Players. They presented his early one act plays. By the early twenties, O’Neill had turned to full-length plays producing a significant body of work in a short time, including The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), Marco Millions (1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Ah, Wilderness (1933). During this period he won three Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), and Strange Interlude (1928), and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. O’Neill explored numerous styles in his writing, each play creating a different identity from the previous work, but always attaining a new idiom for the American theatre even if the plays were not always popular in his lifetime. In fact, it was a 1956 New York revival of The Iceman Cometh, written in 1946, directed by Jose Quintero and starring Jason Robards that led to a new hunger for O’Neill’s work three years after he had died in 1953. O’Neill’s widow then released three plays that O’Neill had kept to himself. These family dramas showed just how searing, revealing, and personal the American stage could be: A Touch of the Poet, Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which earned O’Neill posthumously his fourth Pulitzer Prize.
