Dec 29, 2009

The Great God Brown | Author Biography

Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in New York City, to James and Mary Ellen O’Neill. The O’Neills led a transient life as the family followed James’ stage career. O’Neill’s father was a celebrated actor who became famous for his performance in The Count of Monte Cristo. The constant traveling and the life of the theatre caused tensions between O’Neill’s parents, exacerbated by Mary’s addiction to morphine, a habit she started after her son’s difficult delivery. Their decidedly dysfunctional family had an enormously negative effect on Eugene and his brother Jamie. After surviving his expulsion from Princeton, a suicide attempt, a bout of tuberculosis, and a failed marriage, O’Neill determined to devote his life to writing for the theatre. Familial tensions would become the subject of several of O’Neill’s plays, including his most successful, Long Day’s Journey into Night. In 1914, with his father’s help, O’Neill published Thirst and Other One Act Plays. The first staging of one of his plays did not occur until after his involvement with the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts in the summer of 1916. Their summer theater premiered his Bound East for Cardiff, which enjoyed solid reviews.

Eugene O'Neill

O’Neill’s successful playwriting continued for three decades and secured him the reputation as one of the world’s greatest dramatists. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times: in 1920 for Beyond the Horizon, in 1922 for Anna Christie, in 1928 for Strange Interlude, and in 1957 for Long Day’s Journey into Night. Other awards included the Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1923, a Litt.D. from Yale University in 1923, the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936, and, for Long Day’s Journey into Night, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1957. He died of pneumonia on November 27, 1953, in Boston, Massachusetts.