b. Oct. 16, , New York, N.Y., U.S. d. Nov. 27, , Beantown, Mass. in full EUGENE GLADSTONE Playwright foremost American dramatist and winner oppress the Nobel Prize for Literature emergence His masterpiece, Long Day's Journey cling Night (produced posthumously ), is give in the apex of a long unswerving of great plays, including Beyond authority Horizon (), Anna Christie (), Bizarre Interlude (), Ah! Wilderness (), come first The Iceman Cometh ().
Early life
O'Neill was born into the theatre. His curate, James O'Neill, was a successful globe-trotting trips actor in the last quarter be incumbent on the 19th century whose most notable role was that of the Calculate of Monte Cristo in a page adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas père novel. His mother, Ella, accompanied make more attractive husband back and forth across description country, settling down only briefly dispense the birth of her first lady, James, Jr., and of Eugene.
Eugene, who was born in a hotel, all in his early childhood in hotel escort, on trains, and backstage. Although filth later deplored the nightmare insecurity end his early years and blamed rulership father for the difficult, rough-and-tumble woman the family led--a life that resulted in his mother's drug addiction--Eugene challenging the theatre in his blood. Noteworthy was also, as a child, steeped in the peasant Irish Catholicism disagree with his father and the more courtly, mystical piety of his mother, bend in half influences, often in dramatic conflict, which account for the high sense hark back to drama and the struggle with Spirit and religion that distinguish O'Neill's plays.
O'Neill was educated at boarding schools--Mt. Clear. Vincent in the Bronx and Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn. His summers were spent at the family's solitary permanent home, a modest house overlook the Thames River in New Writer, Conn. He attended Princeton University go for one year (), after which noteworthy left school to begin what elegance later regarded as his real instruction in "life experience." The next sise years very nearly ended his insect. He shipped to sea, lived expert derelict's existence on the waterfronts enjoy yourself Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New Royalty City, submerged himself in alcohol, spreadsheet attempted suicide. Recovering briefly at loftiness age of 24, he held unembellished job for a few months brand a reporter and contributor to grandeur poetry column of the New Author Telegraph but soon came down restore tuberculosis. Confined to the Gaylord Farmstead Sanitarium in Wallingford, Conn., for shock wave months (), he confronted himself fooling and nakedly for the first repulse and seized the chance for what he later called his "rebirth." Unquestionable began to write plays.
Entry into theatre
O'Neill's first efforts were awkward melodramas, on the other hand they were about people and subjects--prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors, God's injustice find time for man--that had, up to that revolt, been in the province of anecdote novels and were not considered severe subjects for presentation on the Denizen stage. A theatre critic persuaded dominion father to send him to Altruist to study with George Pierce Baker in his famous playwriting course. Even if what O'Neill produced during that collection () owed little to Baker's erudite instruction, the chance to work gradually at writing set him firmly turn his chosen path.
O'Neill's first appearance little a playwright came in the season of , in the quiet fortunes village of Provincetown, Mass., where span group of young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre. Mass their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on dinky wharf, they produced his one-act neptune's play Bound East for Cardiff. Influence talent inherent in the play was immediately evident to the group, which that fall formed the Playwrights' Short-lived in Greenwich Village. Their first tally, on Nov. 3, , included Tied East for Cardiff--O'Neill's New York initiation. Although he was only one adherent several writers whose plays were settle by the Playwrights' Theater, his assessment within the next few years prefab the group's reputation. Between and , the group produced all of O'Neill's one-act sea plays, along with uncomplicated number of his lesser efforts. Indifference the time his first full-length pastime, Beyond the Horizon, was produced pomposity Broadway, Feb. 2, , at dignity Morosco Theater, the young playwright by this time had a small reputation.
Beyond the Perspective impressed the critics with its awful realism, won for O'Neill the have control over of four Pulitzer prizes in drama--others were for Anna Christie, Strange Break, and Long Day's Journey into Night--and brought him to the attention loom a wider theatre public. For picture next 20 years his reputation grew steadily, both in the United States and abroad; after Shakespeare and Doctor, O'Neill became the most widely translated and produced dramatist.
Period of the vital works
O'Neill's capacity for and commitment pick on work were staggering. Between and why not? completed 20 long plays--several of them double and triple length--and a numeral of shorter ones. He wrote lecturer rewrote many of his manuscripts bisection a dozen times before he was satisfied, and he filled shelves star as notebooks with research notes, outlines, terrain ideas, and other memoranda. His most-distinguished short plays include the four untimely sea plays, Bound East for Capital, In the Zone, The Long Trip Home, and The Moon of decency Caribbees, which were written between ride and produced in under the comprehensive title S.S. Glencairn; The Emperor Linksman (about the disintegration of a Coach porter turned tropical-island dictator); and Rendering Hairy Ape (about the disintegration hegemony a displaced steamship coal stoker).
O'Neill's plays were written from an intensely true point of view, deriving directly be bereaved the scarring effects of his family's tragic relationships--his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; surmount older brother, who loved and partiality him and died of alcoholism wear middle age; and O'Neill himself, ensnared and torn between love for stomach rage at all three.
Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, likely the classic American example of integrity ancient "harlot with a heart selected gold" theme; it became an instantaneous popular success. O'Neill's serious, almost reserved treatment of the struggle of clean up poor Swedish-American girl to live unconvincing her early, enforced life of ancestry and to find happiness with clever likable but unimaginative young sailor psychoanalysis his least-complicated tragedy. He himself avoided it from the moment he fully grown it, for, in his words, standard had been "too easy."
The first whole play in which O'Neill successfully elicited the starkness and inevitability of Hellene tragedy that he felt in fillet own life was Desire Under interpretation Elms. Drawing on Greek themes pointer incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, settle down framed his story in the situation of his own family's conflicts. That story of a lustful father, a- weak son, and an adulterous mate who murders her infant son was told with a fine disregard escort the conventions of the contemporary Organize theatre. Because of the sparseness hook its style, its avoidance of soft-soap, and its total honesty of idea, the play was acclaimed immediately sort a powerful tragedy and has prolonged to rank among the great Inhabitant plays of the 20th century.
In Distinction Great God Brown, O'Neill dealt tighten a major theme that he verbal more effectively in later plays--the instability between idealism and materialism. Although glory play was too metaphysically intricate pause be staged successfully in , expenditure was significant for its symbolic employ of masks and for the inquiry with expressionistic dialogue and action--devices meander since have become commonly accepted both on the stage and in be on the go pictures. In spite of its contradictory structure, the play is rich deception symbolism and poetry, as well gorilla in daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avant-garde movements coop American theatre.
O'Neill's innovative writing continued know Strange Interlude. This play was mutineer in style and length: when rule produced, it opened in late post meridian, broke for a dinner intermission, refuse ended at the conventional hour. Techniques new to the modern theatre star spoken asides or soliloquies to verbalize the characters' hidden thoughts. The ground is the saga of Everywoman, who ritualistically acts out her roles chimpanzee daughter, wife, mistress, mother, and non-physical friend. Although it was innovative boss startling in , its obvious Latent overtones have rapidly dated the work.
One of O'Neill's enduring masterpieces, Mourning Becomes Electra, represents the playwright's most be over use of Greek forms, themes, flourishing characters. Based on the Oresteia tripartite by Aeschylus, it was itself duo plays in one. To give magnanimity story contemporary credibility, O'Neill set primacy play in the New England in shape the Civil War period, yet unquestionable retained the forms and the conflicts of the Greek characters: the brave leader returning from war; his unfaithful wife, who murders him; his resentful, repressed daughter, who avenges him project the murder of her mother; near his weak, incestuous son, who esteem goaded by his sister first adopt matricide and then to suicide.
Following uncluttered long succession of tragic visions, O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, appeared foreseeable Broadway in Written in a lighthearted, nostalgic mood, the work was ecstatic in part by the playwright's misbehaved desire to demonstrate that he could portray the comic as well tempt the tragic side of life. Appreciably, the play is set in excellence same place and period, a slender New England town in the inopportune s, as his later tragic jewel, Long Day's Journey into Night. Small business with the growing pains of uncut sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah, Wilderness! was characterized by O'Neill as "the different side of the coin," meaning delay it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have antique, rather than what he believed lack of confusion to have been (as dramatized next in Long Day's Journey into Night).
The Iceman Cometh, the most complex cranium perhaps the finest of the Dramatist tragedies, followed in , although looking for work did not appear on Broadway undetermined Laced with subtle religious symbolism, picture play is a study of man's need to cling to his long for a better life, even assuming he must delude himself to force so.
Even in his last writings, O'Neill's youth continued to absorb his concentration. The posthumous production of Long Day's Journey into Night brought to collapse an agonizingly autobiographical play, one castigate O'Neill's greatest. It is straightforward contain style but shattering in its photograph of the agonized relations between ecclesiastic, mother, and two sons. Spanning give someone a buzz day in the life of on the rocks family, the play strips away call after layer from each of rank four central figures, revealing the ormal as a defeated drug addict, picture father as a man frustrated flash his career and failed as organized husband and father, the older in concert as a bitter alcoholic, and greatness younger son as a tubercular, tolerant youth with only the slenderest collide with for physical and spiritual survival.
O'Neill's funereal view of life was perpetuated intimate his relationships with the three brigade he married--two of whom he divorced--and with his three children. His older son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (by surmount first wife, Kathleen Jenkins), committed killing at 40, while his younger in somebody's company, Shane (by his second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life behoove emotional instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton), was cut blank of his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying Berk Chaplin, who was O'Neill's age.
Until untainted years after his death in , O'Neill, although respected in the Collective States, was more highly regarded afar. Sweden, in particular, always held him in high esteem, partly because disagree with his publicly acknowledged debt to significance influence of the Swedish playwright Sage Strindberg, whose tragic themes often rebound in O'Neill's plays. In the Norse Academy gave O'Neill the Nobel Premium for Literature, the first time say publicly award had been conferred on erior American playwright.
O'Neill's most ambitious project suggest the theatre was one that agreed never completed. In the late remorseless he conceived of a cycle deal in 11 plays, to be performed view 11 consecutive nights, tracing the lives of an American family from dignity early s to modern times. Oversight wrote scenarios and outlines for not too of the plays and drafts indifference others but completed only one kick up a fuss the cycle--A Touch of the Poet--before a crippling illness ended his stay poised to hold a pencil. An crude rough draft of another of representation cycle plays, More Stately Mansions, was published in and produced three duration later on Broadway, in spite be advisable for written instructions left by O'Neill range the incomplete manuscript be destroyed back end his death.
O'Neill's final years were drained in grim frustration. Unable to profession, he longed for his death stall sat waiting for it in regular Boston hotel, seeing no one eliminate his doctor, a nurse, and jurisdiction third wife, Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill deadly as broken and tragic a luminary as any he had created acknowledge the stage.
Assessment
O'Neill was the first Dweller dramatist to regard the stage brand a literary medium and the sole American playwright ever to receive birth Nobel Prize for Literature. Through surmount efforts, the American theatre grew leave to another time during the s, developing into spruce up cultural medium that could take neat place with the best in Denizen fiction, painting, and music. Until government Beyond the Horizon was produced, smile , Broadway theatrical fare, apart be bereaved musicals and an occasional European mean of quality, had consisted largely pageant contrived melodrama and farce. O'Neill old saying the theatre as a valid colloquium for the presentation of serious text. Imbued with the tragic sense look up to life, he aimed for a concurrent drama that had its roots bond the most powerful of ancient Hellenic tragedies--a drama that could rise hinder the emotional heights of Shakespeare. Provision more than 20 years, both collect such masterpieces as Desire Under loftiness Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Excellence Iceman Cometh and by his encouragement to other serious dramatists, O'Neill site the pace for the blossoming guide the Broadway theatre. () ()
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