Eugene O'Neill

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Eugene O'Neill died the same way he was born: in a hotel room. As he whispered his last words at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston on the 27th of November 1953, he said, "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room." It was a darkly fitting exit for a man who spent his life writing about people trapped by fate, addiction, and despair.

  O'Neill had entered the world on the 16th of October 1888 at the Barrett House hotel on what was then Longacre Square in New York City, the same patch of Manhattan that would become Times Square. His father was a touring actor. His mother was addicted to morphine. His older brother drank himself to death at 45. Before he turned thirty, O'Neill had attempted suicide, contracted tuberculosis, and spent years at sea sinking into depression and alcoholism.

  From that wreckage came the only playwright in American history to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, and the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. What drove a man who saw so much darkness to spend his life putting it on stage? And what happened to the family he built, and then destroyed, along the way?

• 2. A Stage Family's Shadow

  ›

  James O'Neill, Eugene's father, was an Irish immigrant actor who spent much of his career on the road with a theatrical company. His absences shaped his youngest son's childhood in concrete ways. In 1895, when Eugene was seven, his parents' touring schedule meant he was sent away to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. By 1900 he had moved on to the De La Salle Institute on 59th Street in Manhattan.

  The family's one constant gathering place was the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut, where they reunited during summers. The house would later become a National Historic Landmark in 1971, and the memories it held would eventually power some of O'Neill's most painful writing.

  His time at Princeton University lasted only a year, and accounts differ wildly on why he left. Some say he was dropped for skipping too many classes. Others cite conduct violations. A vivid but possibly invented story claims he threw a beer bottle through the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson, the future president of the United States. The truth is contested; what is clear is that formal education never held him for long.

  His father's alcoholism and his mother's morphine addiction, prescribed after the difficult birth of Eugene himself, set the emotional template for the family. His elder brother Jamie, who appears as a figure of ruinous charm in several of O'Neill's later works, died of alcoholism at the age of 45. The parents and Jamie all died within three years of one another, just as Eugene was beginning to establish himself in the theater.

• 3. Rock Bottom, Then the Page

  ›

  In 1912, O'Neill attempted suicide in his room at Jimmy-the-Priest's boarding house and saloon in New York. He had returned to the city after years at sea and was living in poverty. That same year brought two more blows: his divorce from his first wife Kathleen Jenkins, whom he had married on the 2nd of October 1909, and a diagnosis of tuberculosis.

  The sanatorium where he recovered became, in his own word, his "rebirth." It was there that he decided he would become a playwright. He left that period with a declaration that would define the rest of his life: "I want to be an artist or nothing."

  Before the tuberculosis, O'Neill had worked for the New London Telegraph writing poetry and news reports. After his recovery, he enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1914 to study with George Pierce Baker, whose course "Workshop 47" taught the craft of playwriting. He stayed only a year before leaving for New York's Greenwich Village, which in the 1910s was alive with radical politics and literary ambition.

  Among his friends there was John Reed, the Communist Labor Party of America founder whose life would later become the subject of the 1981 film Reds. O'Neill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, the writer Louise Bryant. When Warren Beatty made Reds, Jack Nicholson played O'Neill, and Diane Keaton played Bryant. Nicholson received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.

• 4. The Provincetown Breakthrough

  ›

  Mid-1916 was when O'Neill's connection to the Provincetown Players began, and it changed the direction of American theater. Terry Carlin reported that O'Neill arrived that summer carrying "a trunk full of plays," though this was likely an exaggeration. What followed was more intimate than theatrical legend suggests.

  Susan Glaspell, one of the Players' founders, described the first reading of Bound East for Cardiff in the living room of the home she shared with her husband George Cram Cook on Commercial Street. A man named Freddie Burt read the play aloud while O'Neill waited nervously in the dining room, unable to watch. When the reading ended, the room found him still there.

  The Provincetown Players went on to perform many of his early works, both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Several of these early plays moved uptown to Broadway, including The Emperor Jones. An even earlier one-act, The Web, written in 1913, had already staked out the territory O'Neill would make his own: the brothel world, the lives of prostitutes, the birth of a child into that world. At the time, these were not simply edgy choices. They were, by any measure, an innovation in what the American stage was willing to show.

  Beyond the Horizon, his first published full-length play, opened on Broadway in 1920 to immediate acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That same year, The Emperor Jones ran on Broadway and waded into the debate over U.S. occupation of Haiti, a live political issue in that year's presidential election.

• 5. Nobel, Strindberg, and the Debt Acknowledged

  ›

  In 1936, Henrik Schück, a member of the Swedish Academy, nominated O'Neill for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and O'Neill won it. The acceptance speech he gave was not a display of diplomatic flattery. It was a direct tribute to the Swedish writer August Strindberg, whose work O'Neill credited as a foundational influence on his own.

  In conversation with Russel Crouse before the speech was finalized, O'Neill insisted that the tribute to Strindberg was not a polite gesture toward a Swedish audience. "It is absolutely sincere," he said, and added: "it's absolutely true that I am proud of the opportunity to acknowledge my debt to Strindberg thus publicly to his people."

  Before the speech was sent to Stockholm, O'Neill read it aloud to his friend Sophus Keith Winther. Mid-reading, he stopped himself and said: "I wish immortality were a fact, for then some day I would meet Strindberg." When Winther pushed back and said that seemed a thin reason to justify immortality, O'Neill replied without hesitation: "It would be enough for me."

  The influence of Strindberg was visible in O'Neill's technical ambitions. He was part of a movement to revive the classical heroic mask from ancient Greek and Japanese Noh theatre, deploying it in plays like The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed. His earlier innovations, bringing American English vernacular onto the stage and centering characters from the social margins, had already been reshaping what American drama could attempt. O'Neill was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1935, one year before the Nobel came.

• 6. Three Marriages, Four Children

  ›

  O'Neill's first marriage, to Kathleen Jenkins, lasted from the 2nd of October 1909 to 1912 and produced one son, Eugene O'Neill Jr., born on the 5th of May 1910. He met his second wife, Agnes Boulton, in 1917. She was a successful writer of commercial fiction, and they married on the 12th of April 1918. They had two children: Shane, born on the 30th of October 1919, and Oona, born on the 14th of May 1925.

  Boulton later wrote a memoir, Part of a Long Story, published in 1958, that described the years of their marriage with vividness. Those years included time in Connecticut, Bermuda, and Point Pleasant, New Jersey, where her parents owned their home. The marriage ended on the 2nd of July 1929 when O'Neill left Boulton and the children for the actress Carlotta Monterey. He married Monterey less than a month after the divorce was finalized.

  In their early years together, Monterey organized O'Neill's daily life in ways that freed him to write. They lived for a time in the Loire Valley of central France, in the Chateau du Plessis in Saint-Antoine-du-Rocher. Later they moved to Sea Island, Georgia, to a house they called Casa Genotta, and then to Tao House in Danville, California, where O'Neill lived from 1937 to 1944.

  In 1943, O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona after she married the English actor, director, and producer Charlie Chaplin. Oona was 18; Chaplin was 54. O'Neill never saw her again, and through her he had eight grandchildren he never met. Eugene O'Neill Jr., a Yale classicist, struggled with alcoholism and died by suicide on the 25th of September 1950 at the age of 40. Shane O'Neill became addicted to heroin, moved into the family home in Bermuda with his new wife, and sold the furnishings to support himself. He too was disowned by his father before his own death.

• 7. The Cycle That Never Was

  ›

  At Tao House in Danville, O'Neill conceived an enormous project he called "the Cycle": eleven plays that would chronicle American life from 1755 to 1932. It was an ambition proportional to his gifts. Only two of those eleven plays, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, were completed.

  A Parkinson's-like tremor in his hands eventually made writing by hand impossible, and it worsened over his final decade. He tried dictation but found he could not compose that way. As the Cycle slipped away, he turned inward and wrote three plays that drew directly on his own life: The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He finished all three in 1943, just before he left Tao House and lost the ability to write altogether.

  A Moon for the Misbegotten was produced in 1947 and failed. It took decades before audiences and critics came to regard it as one of his finest works. The Iceman Cometh, produced in 1946 after a ten-year pause in O'Neill's public output, drew on his memories of Jimmy-the-Priest's boarding house and the Hell Hole, both from his years of poverty and despair in New York.

  The fate of several manuscripts from this period is itself a small mystery. O'Neill's publisher, Saxe Commins, wrote an account describing the disappearance of manuscripts O'Neill had brought from San Francisco. "When the table was cleared I learned the cause of the tension; the manuscripts were lost. They had disappeared mysteriously during the day and there was no clue to their whereabouts." What those manuscripts contained was never established.

  In 2000, researchers studying O'Neill's autopsy concluded that he had died not from the effects of alcohol or Parkinson's disease, but from cerebellar cortical atrophy, a rare form of brain deterioration. The tremor that silenced him was its own distinct condition, separate from the addictions and sorrows that ran through his entire life.

• 8. Long Day's Journey Into Legacy

  ›

  O'Neill left written instructions that Long Day's Journey into Night should not be made public until twenty-five years after his death. Carlotta overrode that instruction. In 1956, three years after O'Neill died, she arranged for the play to be published and produced on stage. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since come to be regarded as his finest work, a play that dramatizes the events immediately preceding his tuberculosis diagnosis and sanatorium stay, the very crisis that made him a playwright.

  The broader recognition came steadily. George C. White founded the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, in 1964. His home at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Tao House in Danville was preserved as the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in 1976. A theatre at 230 West 49th Street in midtown Manhattan bears his name and has housed productions including Grease, Annie, Spring Awakening, and The Book of Mormon.

  In 1967 the United States Postal Service included O'Neill in its Prominent Americans series with a one-dollar stamp. His papers are held at Yale University, and the Louis Sheaffer Collection at Connecticut College preserves material gathered by his biographer.

  References to O'Neill have turned up across decades of American culture, from Upton Sinclair's 1956 book The Cup of Fury to the 2015 film Avengers: Age of Ultron, where Tony Stark specifically names Long Day's Journey into Night. That a play written by a man who could no longer hold a pen, built from memories he initially wanted sealed from the world, became the most-cited single work by America's most decorated playwright is a fitting, if uncomfortable, irony O'Neill himself might have appreciated.