About the Author

Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and the only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1936), Eugene O'Neill remains one of the most innovative contributors to United States theater. So many of the features of staging and directing that are commonplace in the American theater today have their origins in the creative and imaginative contributions that O'Neill developed in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.

Eugene O'Neill was born in a New York hotel on October 16, 1888, and claimed at one time that, since he was born in a hotel, he fully expected to die in one. The son of a family in professional theater -- his father was "an eminent romantic actor" -- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill attended private schools and Princeton University (Perkins, 1550). Seminal experiences on the sea and sojourns in ports of Africa, Central and South America provided the stimuli for many characters and conflicts that would later figure in his plays. It was only after a year-long stay in a sanitarium to counter an infection of tuberculosis, however, that the bright young man found his calling in writing plays. He attended the Baker dramatic workshop at Harvard in 1912 and then joined the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod where he trained with other young actors and writers who would later "follow their stars to Greenwich Village and to Broadway" (Perkins).

Success came quickly for the young playwright. His first manuscript, S. S. Glencairn, was produced by the Provincetown Players, and his first long play, Beyond the Horizon (1920) brought him his first Pulitzer Prize. After Beyond the Horizon,The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, and The Hairy Ape all came quickly. These were followed by psychological tragedies including All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), and Strange Interlude (1928), each exploring controversial and complex psychological and social issues. Ah, Wildnerness, written during this period, was to be O'Neill's only excursion into comedy.

Suffering from what would be a terminal illness, O'Neill's creativity would move somewhat erratically after World War II, but his achievements were no less significant. He finished The Iceman Cometh in 1939, a one-act play Hughie (1940), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Another masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night, completed in 1941 but not produced until 1956, explored the themes of "love, madness, and death played out between his frail parents" (Perkins, 1551). Its production in Stockholm in 1956, just after his death, brought him the first ever posthumous award of a Pulitzer Prize, his fourth. Other drafts completed but never published during his life were produced in the next two decades. Performed by the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm, A Touch of the Poet appeared in 1957 and was produced again in New York in 1958. More Stately Mansions appeared in 1963, followed by Hughie in 1964.

The "triumph of his career" (Perkins, 1551), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) echoes Aeschylus's trilogy of Greek tragedies, transferring their conflicts to an American setting during the period of the Civil War. Each of O'Neill's plays exhibits a gripping intensity and power; yet, each is unique in nature and style, making it difficult to single out any one work as the "typical" O'Neill drama (Perkins, 1549). That factor, perhaps, is what characterizes his achievement and why the canon of his work remains the monumental dramatic contribution to the evolution of American theater.