Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill an American playwright (1888-1953), the first to bring serious dramatic art to the American stage and the only American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. His plays, including Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and Mourning Becomes Electra, combined psychological realism with experimental form and established an American tragedy of modern life.

Early Life and the Sea

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in New York in October 1888, the son of an actor, James O'Neill, who had made a fortune playing the lead in a popular melodrama and was never able to escape it. The family toured with the play, and the boy grew up in hotels and railway carriages, a rootlessness that left him with a lifelong sense of homelessness and a suspicion of settled respectability.

He was educated at a Catholic boarding school and briefly at Princeton, from which he was expelled, and then drifted through a series of jobs, including a period as a sailor on voyages to South America and England. These years gave him an intimate knowledge of the waterfront and of the dispossessed, the raw material of his early one-act plays. He also tried his hand at gold prospecting in Honduras.

A period of illness and heavy drinking in his twenties brought him to a sanatorium, where he began to read widely in drama and decided to become a playwright. He studied briefly at Harvard under George Pierce Baker, whose playwriting course was the most famous of its day. His own experience of failure and addiction gave his work an authority that no amount of reading could have supplied.

First Success and Experimental Drama

His first productions were staged by the Provincetown Players, a small experimental company, and his early one-act plays about the sea and the poor won immediate attention. Bound East for Cardiff and other short works showed a directness and a sympathy for ordinary speech that set them apart from the commercial theatre of the time. With them the serious American drama may be said to have begun.

Beyond the Horizon (1920) brought him the Pulitzer Prize and established him as the leading American dramatist of his generation. The Emperor Jones (1920) used expressionist techniques and the sound of the tom-tom to portray the terror of a deposed dictator, and The Hairy Ape (1922) made a stoker into a symbol of modern alienation. These plays showed his eagerness to use the stage as a vehicle for ideas.

He continued to experiment throughout the 1920s. Anna Christie won a second Pulitzer, and Desire Under the Elms transplanted Greek tragedy to a New England farm. In Strange Interlude he used soliloquies to expose his characters' hidden thoughts, and in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) he recast the Oresteia of Aeschylus in the aftermath of the American Civil War, a trilogy of guilt, incest and revenge that ranks among his most ambitious works.

The Great Late Plays

After a long silence O'Neill returned in the late 1930s with the plays on which his reputation now chiefly rests. The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946) gathers a group of barroom dreamers who cling to their pipe dreams and are destroyed by the salesman who tries to take them away. It is a profound and compassionate study of illusion as a condition of survival.

Long Day's Journey into Night (written 1941, published 1956) is widely regarded as his masterpiece. In a single day it exposes the mutual love and recrimination of the Tyrone family, modelled on his own, as it moves from morning toward night, and it transmutes private pain into a tragedy of extraordinary tenderness. O'Neill left instructions that it was not to be produced until after his death, and its first performance confirmed his stature.

A Moon for the Misbegotten and the unfinished cycle A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed continued his exploration of the family and of American greed. The autobiographical late plays, spare and unsparing, are generally considered the finest realisation of his lifelong ambition to write a modern tragedy of recognisable human beings.

Themes and Theatrical Technique

O'Neill's central subject is the family and the web of love, guilt and resentment that binds its members. His characters are driven by forces they only half understand, and his plays refuse the easy moral verdict in favour of an unflinching attention to their suffering. He saw human life as a struggle with the mystery beyond it, and his work is haunted by the search for a faith that the modern world no longer supplies.

As a craftsman he was both naturalistic and experimental. He used masks, asides, expressionist scenery and the extended soliloquy to expose the interior lives of his characters, and he adapted the structure of Greek tragedy to American material. At the same time he wrote dialogue of great flexibility, in which the rhythms of ordinary speech carry the weight of intense feeling.

He drove himself to write with a discipline that ruined his health, and his art was inseparable from his life. The honesty with which he turned his own family and his own struggles into drama gave his work a moral seriousness that was new to the American stage and that remains its greatest legacy.

Influence and Legacy

O'Neill transformed the American theatre from a form of commercial entertainment into a medium for serious art. Before him the American stage offered little that could be compared with the European drama of Ibsen and Strindberg; after him it produced a succession of playwrights who took the writing of plays seriously as literature. He made the profession of the American dramatist respectable.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, the first American playwright to be so honoured, and he won the Pulitzer Prize four times. His work has been performed and studied throughout the world, and Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as one of the great plays of the twentieth century and a permanent landmark of the American repertoire.

He died in Boston in November 1953, and his funeral was attended by a small group of friends. His reputation has only grown, and later dramatists, above all Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, acknowledged him as the pioneer who cleared the ground they built upon. He is remembered as the founder of modern American drama.

See also

• American drama
• Long Day's Journey into Night
• Nobel Prize in Literature
• Expressionism