thousand dollars annually to assuage his incessant fear of poverty. Later, the father came to believe that he had sacrificed his opportunity for greatness upon the altar of materialism. His son took this regret as a cautionary lesson and resolved never to compromise his artistic integrity for money.

Eugene’s mother, Ellen Quinlan O’Neill (1857-1922), was a devout Catholic, educated in a convent in South Bend, Indiana, where she won a medal for her piano-playing but seriously considered becoming a nun. She fell in love with the dashing James O’Neill when his company toured South Bend. She accompanied her husband on his road trips for many years, all the while resenting their nomadic itinerary of frequent one-night stands, hotel rooms, and irregular meals. Eugene, once established as a playwright, developed an emphatic fondness for settled routine and a detestation of trains and hotels.

Ellen O’Neill found an escape from her aversion to theatrical traveling by becoming an increasingly addicted morphine user. She withdrew from many of her child-rearing responsibilities, leaving Eugene to be mothered, during his first seven years, by a Cornish nursemaid, Sarah Sandy, who exposed her charge to sensational horror stories. The elder O’Neill sent his son to Catholic preparatory schools in New York and Connecticut. In 1906, Eugene entered Princeton University, drank heavily, and studied very little; after a brick-throwing episode, he was failed in all of his courses and never returned to the university. For the next two years, he spent most of his time touring Manhattan in the company of his alcoholic older brother, James, Jr. (1878-1923).

On October 2, 1909, Eugene secretly married the non-Catholic Kathleen Jenkins, the beautiful daughter of a once-wealthy New York family. Two weeks later, the bridegroom left her to prospect for gold in Honduras. There he found not shining metal but a severe case of malaria; he was to use his knowledge of the tropical jungle in The Emperor Jones (1920). Even though Kathleen gave birth to a son, Eugene, Jr., on May 5, 1910, O’Neill refused to live with them upon his return, ignoring his firstborn until after the child’s eleventh birthday. On July 10, 1912, Kathleen Jenkins was awarded an interlocutory divorce decree.

The year 1912 proved to be the crucial year of Eugene O’Neill’s life: The nuclear O’Neill family—father, mother, two sons—spent the summer together in O’Neill’s parents’ New London, Connecticut, home, with Eugene writing for the local paper. In December, 1912, he was diagnosed as tubercular; Ellen O’Neill refused to accept the physician’s findings, withdrawing into morphine-induced fantasies. Miserly James O’Neill first placed Eugene in Connecticut’s Fairfield County State Sanatorium, a bleakly depressing charity institution, many of whose patients died. After staying there from December 9 to 11, Eugene had himself discharged. On Christmas Eve, James entered his son in a private institution, Gaylord Farm, which proved distinctly more therapeutic: Eugene was discharged as an arrested case on the third of June, 1913; The Straw (1921), one of his most deeply felt early plays, is a heavily autobiographical depiction of his stay there.

Life’s Work

During his sanatorium stay, O’Neill crystallized his career goal: he would be a playwright. His most pervasive influence was the intense, self-tortured, somber Swedish writer, August Strindberg . In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him in 1936, O’Neill singled out Strindberg as “that greatest genius of all modern dramatists.... It was reading his plays ... that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theater myself.”

After his discharge from the institution, O’Neill boarded for a year with a private family and used this time to write thirteen plays, of which he included six one-act plays in a volume, Thirst (1914), subsidized by his father; he later disowned this collection, preventing its republication during his lifetime. From September, 1914, to May, 1915, he was a student in Professor George Pierce Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard, remembered by classmates as handsome, thin, shy, and restless.

In 1916, O’Neill fell in love with the high-spirited journalist Louise Bryant, already the mistress and soon to be the wife of the celebrated war correspondent John Reed (1887-1920). The two men liked each other, and the trio formed a turbulent triangle which persisted close to the day of O’Neill’s second marriage to Agnes Boulton on April 12, 1918. Indeed, Agnes reminded O’Neill of Louise: Both women were slender, pretty, and sophisticated; Agnes, however, was quiet and softly feminine, in contrast to Louise’s strident manner. The marriage to Agnes Boulton lasted eleven years; its first two years are vividly described in her account, Part of a Long Story (1958). The union resulted in two children. Shane O’Neill (1919-1975) was never able to settle on a career and became a hopeless heroin addict. Oona O’Neill (born 1925) married Charles Chaplin (1889-1977). O’Neill’s firstborn son, Eugene O’Neill, Jr., tall and handsome with a resonant voice, began a brilliant career as a classicist at Yale but turned increasingly alcoholic, resigned his academic post, and, in his fortieth year, committed suicide. O’Neill held himself apart from his children throughout his life, although he did make sporadic, intense, but always short-lived attempts to reach them intimately.

O’Neill’s first important play, The Emperor Jones, dramatizes, in eight scenes, Brutus Jones’s fall from “emperor” of a West Indian island to a primitive savage who is slaughtered by his rebellious people. Jones is a former Pullman porter who escapes imprisonment for murder, finds his way to the island, and there establishes himself as a despot by exploiting the natives’ fears and superstitions. While the play’s first and last scenes are realistic, the intervening six are expressionistic, consisting of Jones’s monologues and the visions of his fearful mind as he struggles through a tropical jungle. O’Neill manages to merge supernatural beliefs with psychological effects in a powerful union that shows his dramatic affinity with two noted German expressionists, Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) and Ernst Toller (1893-1939).

Desire Under the Elms (1924) is usually considered O’Neill’s finest play of the 1920’s, his first in the classic Greek mode. It is a modern treatment of the Phaedra-Hippolytus-Theseus myth, set on a New England farm in 1850. The father, seventy-five-year-old Ephraim Cabot (Theseus), returns to his farm with a passionate new wife, thirty-five-year-old Abbie (Phaedra), who falls in love with her twenty-five-year-old stepson, Eben (Hippolytus). Like Phaedra, Abbie confronts the young man in a superb scene; unlike Phaedra, Abbie wins him. They become lovers and have a child, which Abbie kills in infancy to demonstrate her primary love for Eben. He insists on sharing her guilt; they go to jail together, remorseful over their infanticide but not over their adultery. O’Neill dramatizes in this play not only sexual but also materialistic desire: Desire for the farm causes Abbie to marry old Ephraim; resentment of his father’s usurpation of the farm from his abused, dead mother causes Eben to exact vengeance upon the father he hates. The play’s multiple setting effectively counterpoints the older and younger generations, external nature and domestic temperament.

Determined to compress within his career virtually all stages of drama, O’Neill challenged Aeschylus with his longest work, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a thirteen-act trilogy. The action is a modern adaptation of the Oresteia (458 b.c.e.), with O’Neill following Agamemnon faithfully with his The Homecoming, and Libation Bearers fairly closely with The Hunted, but departing freely from Eumenides in The Haunted. The Trojan War becomes the American Civil War, with the Mannon family (House of Atreus) awaiting the return from the fighting of Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon). The daughter, Lavinia (Electra), has discovered that her mother, Christine (Clytemnestra), has been having an affair with Adam Brant (Aegisthus). In The Haunted, the playwright abandons Aeschylus in favor of Freud by having Orin (Orestes), racked by remorse for his mother’s suicide, not murder (as in Aeschylus), but transfer his incestuous feelings for his mother to his sister, who has come to resemble his mother. Lavinia rejects him, Orin commits suicide, and Lavinia realizes that she has always loved her father and hated her mother. She closes the drama by rejecting marriage to a loyal suitor, instead immuring herself, with the Mannon dead, alone in the Mannon house. This work had the most laudatory initial reception of any O’Neill play, but a number of critics have since tempered the original enthusiasm, deploring the drama’s implausibly implacable determinism, the overly clinical, self-analytic speeches of its leading characters, and the absence of even the slightest elements of humor or warmth.

From 1934 to 1946, O’Neill did not have a play produced. He spent these years largely in a Chinese-style mansion, Tao House, built to his specifications in Contra Costa County, California. He devoted most of his work to an ambitious cycle of eleven related plays dealing with the rise and fall of an American family from 1775 to 1932, to be called A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, which would offer his adverse judgment on America’s increasing enslavement to possession and greed. “We are the clearest example,” he declared, “of ‘For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ “ The only play of this cycle surviving in completed form is A Touch of the Poet, set in a Massachusetts tavern in 1828 and treating the marriage of Sara Melody, of Irish descent, and Simon Harford, of Yankee stock. O’Neill wrote various drafts of the cycle’s other plays but, fearing that they might eventually be performed in unfinished form, he and his third wife, Carlotta, burned the manuscripts during the winter of 1952-1953. A third draft of More Stately Mansions escaped the flames and was produced in 1967.

O’Neill had met Carlotta Monterey when she played the society girl in his The Hairy Ape (1922). She was a sultry brunette, usually cast as the sexually magnetic adventuress eventually to be overcome by the virtuous wife. She and O’Neill began their romance in 1928 and married in 1929, three weeks after Agnes Boulton had been granted a Reno divorce. Carlotta loved O’Neill deeply but possessively, routinized his life, limited his contacts with friends, and helped estrange him from his children, whom he disinherited in his will, making her his literary executor. In his middle and later years, O’Neill both impressed and often intimidated people with his “black Irish” appearance: dark, brooding eyes; spare, rangy, five-foot, eleven-inch frame; quiet, deep voice; and mysterious, reserved, often morose temperament. From 1944 to his death in 1953, an uncontrollable hand tremor, similar to that caused by Parkinson’s disease, forced him to stop writing; he tried to dictate but found that method unworkable. His final years were marked not only by physical pain but also by increasing trouble with his children and dissension with his wife. He died of bronchial pneumonia, just past the age of sixty-five.

Most critics regard two plays written at the end of the 1930’s as O’Neill’s greatest, comparable to the finest dramatic achievements of the twentieth century. The first, The Iceman Cometh (1946), is one of his bleakest dramas, set in a squalid barroom in 1912 and portraying more than a dozen drunken wrecks who alternately feed upon and poison one another’s illusions. The sum of their pipe dreams represents the total content of man’s capacity for deception and repudiates any affirmation. The play’s theme—that human beings cannot live without illusions, no matter how ill-founded—parallels that of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884). Opposing the alcoholic customers of Harry Hope’s saloon in this work is a hardware salesman, Hickey, who kicks away their crutches of self-deception out of professed confidence that the truth shall set them free. Yet Hickey turns out to have murdered his long-betrayed wife, not only out of love—as he at first insists—but also out of a lifetime of hatred and self-loathing. Hickey, the derelicts discover, has been a false messiah; they gladly relapse into their drunken delusions. O’Neill has here written a despairing masterpiece about the impossibility of salvation in a man-centered world.

O’Neill’s other, perhaps even more magnificent, achievement is the confessional family play he prepared himself for many years to write, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956). This is O’Neill’s most personal play: The O’Neills are called the Tyrones. His father and elder brother retain their own first names, James. Ellen O’Neill becomes Mary Tyrone, while Eugene names himself Edmund—the name of the O’Neill brother who died in infancy. Did O’Neill, as he claims in his preface, “face [his] dead at last . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones”? A qualified yes is in order, for the author represses the painful data of his first marriage, first son, and first divorce, instead portraying himself as a sensitive, irresponsible, twenty-three-year-old would-be poet without commitments.

The play lives up to its title: It consumes the time from 8:30 a.m. to midnight on a day in August, 1912, in New London—The O’Neill/Tyrone summer residence. It has the unified formality of French classical drama, with the Tyrone quartet bound together by links of resentment, grief, guilt, and recrimination, yet also by tenderness, compassion, and love. Two events charge the action: Mary Tyrone’s final relapse into morphine addiction and the diagnosis of Edmund as tubercular. In the day’s course, she moves away from the other three but especially from her younger son; he moves toward her, in vain agony. Who is to blame for their maladies? All, replies O’Neill—and no one. As Mary says,

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

Summary

In power, insight, scale, and ambition, Eugene O’Neill is unsurpassed among American dramatists. He began as a realist-naturalist in a native tradition that includes Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost in poetry, and Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser in fiction. His middle period is marked by intermittently effective plays, influenced by many European modes, particularly expressionism, and by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. His last work is both his best and his most characteristically American: It demonstrates a fierce determination to dig beneath the illusions and lies of everyday behavior, to assert a profoundly tragic sense of man’s shortcomings, and to reconcile himself to the melancholy state of a flawed and often unjust universe. Like tragedians from Aeschylus to Samuel Beckett, O’Neill has a desolate view of life. His talent in dramatizing that view was often flawed by self-conscious portentousness. In at least two plays, however—The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night—O’Neill climbed dramatic heights unscaled by any other American and rivaled by only a handful of world-renowned modern playwrights: Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg , Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Eugene O’Neill. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This collection includes essays by Lionel Trilling, Doris Falk, Arnold Goldman, Robert Lee, Travis Boyard, Thomas Van Laan, Jean Chathia, C. W. Bigsby, and Michael Manheim, arranged in chronological order by their original publication dates. The theoretical slant is thematic and philosophical, with detailed characters and plot analyses. Contains a brief bibliography.

Brietzke, Zander. The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. A controversial but insightful study of O’Neill’s literary theory, with particular attention to his “anti-theater” approach to character development and storytelling.

Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A comprehensive reference work that contains a wealth of information on the life and works of O’Neill. Contains bibliography and index.

Moorton, Richard F., Jr., ed. Eugene O’Neill’s Century. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. This collection includes excerpts from more than seventeen plays and collected notes as well as articles. Some essays focus on how and why O’Neill’s extensive stage directions have influenced dramatic practice. Six pages of works cited and thirteen pages of index are useful for scholars.

Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. A complete compendium of plays, synopses, production histories, characters, personal and professional acquaintances, and critical analysis. Three appendices include a chronology of plays, adaptations, and a critical overview. Twenty-eight pages of notes and thirty-seven index pages make this work an invaluable encyclopediac resource and guide to further study of O’Neill’s work.

Robinson, James A. Eugene O’Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Taking a philosophical approach to O’Neill’s work, this analysis details possible connections between O’Neill’s plays and Asian mysticism, particularly Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist belief systems. Robinson’s analysis of individual plays, such as The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, sheds new light on the often-stated view of O’Neill’s drama as “religious” and “romantic.”

Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968-1973. This two-part biography is considered the most complete work on O’Neill’s life, and it stands as a model for the genre of literary biography. Including recollections by a variety of O’Neill’s colleagues and friends, this work reads smoothly and effectively combines scholarship and human interest. Generally acknowledged as both sympathetic and trustworthy. Contains notes, index.

Wainscott, Ronald H. Staging O’Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920-1934. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. This highly scholarly yet accessible historical work chronicles the production of O’Neill’s plays and the profound influence of his work on American theater practice.

Author Profile

For the first seven years of O’Neill’s life he traveled with his parents, while his father toured the country as the star in a stage version of The Count of Monte Cristo. He attended boarding schools before entering Princeton University in 1906. After failing to complete his freshman year, he spent the next six years working on steamships and living a drunken, derelict existence in various ports between voyages.

In 1912 O’Neill contracted tuberculosis. While recovering in a sanitarium he began to write plays, mostly only one act long, dealing with people and subject matter that had never been depicted on the American stage—derelicts, prostitutes, and drunken sailors. In 1920 his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, impressed critics with its tragic realism and won him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.

Censors were not far behind. When The Hairy Ape, a play about the tragic life and suicide of a coal-stoker on a steamship, opened on Broadway in 1922, the police department filed a complaint with the magistrate’s court alleging that its language was indecent and obscene. However, they failed to convince the magistrate who read the play and dismissed the complaint.

All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) aroused even fiercer attacks when newspapers learned that O’Neill planned to cast a black man and a white woman as husband and wife, and that the wife would kiss her husband’s hand on stage. The Hearst press led the assault, urging the mayor to prevent the play from opening on the ground that it might incite race riots; however, the mayor had no power to intervene. Wire services carried the story and bushels of hate mail from across the country—including threatening letters from the Ku Klux Klan— descended on O’Neill and the play’s actors. Opening night was tense, but the feared riot never developed.

In 1925 the Manhattan district attorney tried to ban O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms as obscene, objecting to its portrayal of incest and infanticide. He did not succeed, but the play was banned in Boston by that city’s mayor and in Great Britain by the Lord Chamberlain. When it was staged in Los Angeles, the entire cast was arrested and charged with putting on an immoral performance.

Not even O’Neill’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936 silenced his censors. Boston authorities prevented The Iceman Cometh (1946) from being seen in their city. A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947), the last of O’Neill’s plays produced before his death, was attacked during its pre-Broadway tour. Pittsburgh’s elite denounced it as vulgar and indecent. The Detroit police censor insisted on the removal of eight words he considered objectionable before permitting it to open. The play never made it to New York.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Eugene O’Neill. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This collection includes essays by Lionel Trilling, Doris Falk, Arnold Goldman, Robert Lee, Travis Boyard, Thomas Van Laan, Jean Chathia, C. W. Bigsby, and Michael Manheim, arranged in chronological order by their original publication dates. The theoretical slant is thematic and philosophical, with detailed characters and plot analyses. Contains a brief bibliography.

Brietzke, Zander. The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. A controversial but insightful study of O’Neill’s literary theory, with particular attention to his “anti-theater” approach to character development and storytelling.

Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A comprehensive reference work that contains a wealth of information on the life and works of O’Neill. Contains bibliography and index.

Moorton, Richard F., Jr., ed. Eugene O’Neill’s Century. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. This collection includes excerpts from more than seventeen plays and collected notes as well as articles. Some essays focus on how and why O’Neill’s extensive stage directions have influenced dramatic practice. Six pages of works cited and thirteen pages of index are useful for scholars.

Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. A complete compendium of plays, synopses, production histories, characters, personal and professional acquaintances, and critical analysis. Three appendices include a chronology of plays, adaptations, and a critical overview. Twenty-eight pages of notes and thirty-seven index pages make this work an invaluable encyclopediac resource and guide to further study of O’Neill’s work.

Robinson, James A. Eugene O’Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Taking a philosophical approach to O’Neill’s work, this analysis details possible connections between O’Neill’s plays and Asian mysticism, particularly Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist belief systems. Robinson’s analysis of individual plays, such as The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, sheds new light on the often-stated view of O’Neill’s drama as “religious” and “romantic.”

Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968-1973. This two-part biography is considered the most complete work on O’Neill’s life, and it stands as a model for the genre of literary biography. Including recollections by a variety of O’Neill’s colleagues and friends, this work reads smoothly and effectively combines scholarship and human interest. Generally acknowledged as both sympathetic and trustworthy. Contains notes, index.

Wainscott, Ronald H. Staging O’Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920-1934. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. This highly scholarly yet accessible historical work chronicles the production of O’Neill’s plays and the profound influence of his work on American theater practice.