Eugene O’Neill Biography

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in the Barrett Hotel in New York City in 1888, son of James O’Neill, an actor celebrated for his portrayal of the count of Monte Cristo, and Ella Quinlan O’Neill, a sensitive woman who became a narcotics addict shortly after Eugene’s birth. His older brother Jamie was Eugene’s early idol; another brother, Edmund, had died in infancy, evoking a great guilt in his mother. As a child, Eugene toured much of the year with his parents and spent the summers in New London, Connecticut. At the age of seven, partly to protect him from knowledge of his mother’s drug addiction, he was sent to a boarding school outside New York City. Lonely and frightened, he retreated to his imagination and into the world of books. The discovery of his mother’s addiction, when he was almost fifteen, was traumatic; it resulted in his rejection of the Catholic faith and infused his life thereafter with grief for her suffering and guilt for his part in it.

After a year at Princeton University, O’Neill prospected for gold in Honduras, leaving behind a pregnant wife, Kathleen Jenkins, who named their son Eugene, Jr. Shortly after O’Neill’s return, he shipped out to Buenos Aires on the Charles Racine, one of the last sailing ships. The two-month voyage was a high point in his life, and the sea figures prominently in many of his plays, from Bound East for Cardiff (1916) to Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). Back in New York, he drifted aimlessly, drinking and loafing in saloons such as Jimmy-the-Priest’s, which became the setting for Anna Christie (1921) and The Iceman Cometh (1946). Eventually, after cooperatively providing Kathleen with grounds for a divorce, he fell into a deep depression, culminating in a suicide attempt.

When he recovered, his father found him a job as a reporter on the New London Telegraph, but after a few months O’Neill contracted tuberculosis and spent the first half of 1913 at Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut. Perhaps it was this confrontation with mortality that encouraged him to focus his literary talents. He wrote several one-act plays and in the fall of 1914 enrolled in...

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill’s parents were James O’Neill, an actor imprisoned by the material success of his role as the Count of Monte Cristo, and Ellen Quinlan O’Neill, a romantic and idealistic woman similarly trapped for much of her life by an addiction to morphine. The complex psychologies of O’Neill’s parents and his brother, and the relationships among all the family members, figure significantly as subjects of many of O’Neill’s best plays, particularly Long Day’s Journey into Night. Educated in Catholic schools, O’Neill entered Princeton University in 1906 but left before a year was over. His travels in 1910 and 1911 to South America and England provided background for his early plays of the sea,...