The Iceman Cometh | Author Biography

On October 16, 1888 Eugene O'Neill was born in a hotel on Broadway in New York City. His father was a professional actor, and O'Neill lived on the road with his parents until he began attending boarding school at the age of eight. O'Neill's mother, born into an affluent family, was unhappy with the nomadic theatre life, which she considered less than respectable. In part because of O'Neill's difficult birth, she became addicted to drugs. In 1903, she attempted suicide, and O'Neill, at the age of fifteen, learned for the first time of her addiction. That same year, he himself began drinking heavily in a pattern that would persist for most of his life.

O'Neill attended Princeton University, but a drunken prank resulted in his expulsion in 1907 after only nine months of study. Two years later, O'Neill married Kathleen Jenkins. The two had one child, a son, Eugene, Jr. O'Neill and Jenkins did not officially divorce until 1912, but within days of the marriage, O'Neill went to sea, traveling to Honduras and Buenos Aires, where he experienced first-hand the life of a penniless drifter. In 1911, O'Neill returned to New York, where he lived at Jimmy the Priest's, a saloon populated by drunkards, has-beens, and outcasts. Later in his life, O'Neill called Jimmy the Priest's ‘‘a hell hole’’ and said of the establishment, ‘‘One couldn't go any lower.’’ It was Jimmy the Priest's, with its atmosphere of failure, hopelessness, dashed dreams, and despair that, together with its miserable clientele, eventually became the model for Harry Hope's saloon in O'Neill's 1946 play, The Iceman Cometh.

In 1912, O'Neill developed tuberculosis, an event that became a turning point in his life. During the five months he spent in a sanatorium, he decided to become a playwright. He began reading modern dramatists and was particularly affected by the dark work of August Strindberg (Miss Julie), whom he later cited as one of his greatest influences. O'Neill studied playwriting at Harvard for one year. He then moved to Greenwich Village, New York, where he became involved with an avant-garde group of artists and radicals. A number of these people later formed the Provincetown Players, the first group to produce a play of O'Neill's, Bound East for Cardiff, in 1916.

In 1918 O'Neill married Agnes Boulton, with whom he had two children, Shane, in 1919, and Oona, in 1925; the marriage ended in divorce in 1929. In 1920, O'Neill's first full commercial success, Beyond the Horizon, was produced, resulting in the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for its author. That year also saw the production of The Emperor Jones, which focuses on the violence in human nature. In 1924, Desire under the Elms, which reflected O'Neill's interest in Freudian psychology, was produced. Other important plays in the O'Neill canon include the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), modeled on the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus's Oresteia; the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night, probably written around 1939 but produced and published after O'Neill's death (per his decree, given the intensely personal nature of the play); and The Iceman Cometh, written in 1939, produced in 1946, and considered by many to be O'Neill's greatest work. In 1936, O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

During the last ten years of his life, O'Neill was in ill health, suffering from tremors in his hands, which eventually rendered him unable to write. He died of pneumonia November 27, 1953. He is considered by many to be America's greatest playwright.