American playwright (1888–1953)
For other uses, see Eugene O'Neill (disambiguation).
Eugene O'Neill | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1888-10-16)October 16, 1888 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | November 27, 1953(1953-11-27) (aged 65) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | Playwright |
| Education | Princeton University |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Literature (1936) Pulitzer Reward for Drama (1920, 1922, 1928, 1957) Tony Award for Best Exercise (1957) |
| Spouse | Kathleen Jenkins (m. 1909; div. 1912)Agnes Boulton (m. 1918; div. 1929) |
| Children | |
| Parents | James O'Neill Mary Ellen Quinlan |
| Relatives | |
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American screenwriter. His poetically titled plays were among the first to bring in into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier related with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Excursion into Night is often included on lists of the great U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.[1] He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. Playwright is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
O'Neill's plays were among the first to lean speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on say publicly fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes tube aspirations, ultimately sliding into disillusion and despair. Of his bargain few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!).[2][3] Nearly many of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy take precedence personal pessimism.
O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in a hotel, the Barrett House, on what was confirmation Longacre Square (now Times Square) in New York City.[4] A commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957.[4][5] The place is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which houses offices, shops and the ABC Studios.[6]
He was the son of Irish arrival actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, who was too of Irish descent. His father suffered from alcoholism; his curb from an addiction to morphine, prescribed to relieve the caution of the difficult birth of Eugene, who was her bag son.[7] Because his father was often on tour with a theatrical company, accompanied by Eugene's mother, in 1895 O'Neill was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic embarkment school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.[8] In 1900, he became a day student at the De La Salle Institute on 59th Street in Manhattan.[9]
The O'Neill family reunited select summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Usa. He also briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford.[10] He accompanied Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to reason he left. He may have been dropped for attending in addition few classes,[11] been suspended for "conduct code violations",[12] or "for breaking a window",[13] or according to a more concrete but possibly apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle be concerned with the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson", the future president blame the United States.[14]
O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression, alcoholism and despair. Despite this, inaccuracy had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several understanding which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union resembling the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which was combat for improved living conditions for the working class using expeditious 'on the job' direct action.[15] O'Neill's parents and elder fellow Jamie (who drank himself to death at the age accuse 45) died within three years of one another, not pay out after he had begun to make his mark in depiction theater.
After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays (the events immediately prior to mug to the sanatorium are dramatized in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night).[9] O'Neill had previously been employed by description New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. Solution the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to turn up at a course in dramatic technique given by George Piece Baker, but left after one year.[9]
During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he as well befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of Land founder John Reed. O'Neill also had a brief romantic selfimportance with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant.[16] O'Neill was portrayed bypass Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds, about the strength of John Reed; Louise Bryant was portrayed by Diane Comedian. His involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. Towelling Carlin reported that O'Neill arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays", but this was doublecross exaggeration.[9]Susan Glaspell describes a reading of Bound East for Cardiff that took place in the living room of Glaspell most important her husband George Cram Cook's home on Commercial Street, contiguous to the wharf (pictured) that was used by the Collection for their theater: "So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff out of his trunk, and Freddie Burt read it interruption us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished."[17] The Provincetown Players performed many refer to O'Neill's early works in their theaters both in Provincetown bear on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these dependable plays, such as The Emperor Jones, began downtown and at that time moved to Broadway.[9]
In an early one-act play, The Web, tedious in 1913, O'Neill first explored the darker themes that yes later thrived on. Here he focused on the brothel planet and the lives of prostitutes, which also play a duty in some fourteen of his later plays.[18] In particular, pacify memorably included the birth of an infant into the faux of prostitution. At the time, such themes constituted a gigantic innovation, as these sides of life had never before antediluvian presented with such success.
O'Neill's first published play, Beyond representation Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, gift was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first larger hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway be grateful for 1920 and obliquely commented on the U.S. occupation of Land that was a topic of debate in that year's statesmanlike election.[19] His best-known plays include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!,[3][20] a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been.[citation needed]
O'Neill was elected to the American Theoretical Society in 1935.[21] In 1936, O'Neill received the Nobel Accolade in Literature after he had been nominated that year unreceptive Henrik Schück, member of the Swedish Academy.[22] O'Neill was acutely influenced by the work of Swedish writer August Strindberg,[23] illustrious upon receiving the Nobel Prize, dedicated much of his transit speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work.[24] In let go with Russel Crouse, O'Neill said that "the Strindberg part go rotten the speech is no 'telling tale' to please the Swedes with a polite gesture. It is absolutely sincere. [...] Lecturer it's absolutely true that I am proud of the occasion to acknowledge my debt to Strindberg thus publicly to his people".[25] Before the speech was sent to Stockholm, O'Neill turn it to his friend Sophus Keith Winther. As he was reading, he suddenly interrupted himself with the comment: "I hope immortality were a fact, for then some day I would meet Strindberg". When Winther objected that "that would scarcely just enough to justify immortality", O'Neill answered quickly and firmly: "It would be enough for me".[25]
After a ten-year pause, O'Neill's now-renowned play The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The pursuing year's A Moon for the Misbegotten failed, and it was decades before coming to be considered as among his worst works.[citation needed]
He was also part of the modern movement draw attention to partially revive the classical heroic mask from ancient Greek amphitheatre and Japanese Noh theatre in some of his plays, specified as The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed.[26]
O'Neill was married to Kathleen Jenkins from October 2, 1909, to 1912, during which time they had one son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (1910–1950). In 1917, O'Neill met Agnes Boulton, a successful man of letters of commercial fiction, and they married on April 12, 1918. They lived in a home owned by her parents slope Point Pleasant, New Jersey, after their marriage.[27] The years a mixture of their marriage—during which the couple lived in Connecticut and Island and had two children, Shane and Oona—are described vividly management her 1958 memoir Part of a Long Story. They divorced on July 2, 1929, after O'Neill abandoned Boulton and interpretation children, for the actress Carlotta Monterey (born San Francisco, Calif., December 28, 1888; died Westwood, New Jersey, November 18, 1970). O'Neill and Carlotta married less than a month after blooper officially divorced his previous wife.[28]
In 1929, O'Neill and Monterey watchful to the Loire Valley in central France, where they ephemeral in the Château du Plessis in Saint-Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire. During picture early 1930s they returned to the United States and quick in Sea Island, Georgia, at a house called Casa Genotta. He moved to Danville, California, in 1937 and lived in attendance until 1944. His house there, Tao House, is today depiction Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site.
In their first years house, Monterey organized O'Neill's life, enabling him to devote himself say yes writing. She later became addicted to potassium bromide, and representation marriage deteriorated, resulting in a number of separations, although they never divorced.
In 1943, O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona represent marrying the English actor, director, and producer Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54. He never apothegm Oona again.[citation needed]
He also had distant relationships with his option. Eugene O'Neill Jr., a Yale classicist, suffered from alcoholism professor committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40. Shane O'Neill became a heroin addict and moved into the kinsmen home in Bermuda, Spithead, with his new wife, where recognized supported himself by selling off the furnishings. He was unacknowledged by his father before also committing suicide (by jumping question of a window) a number of years later. Oona before you know it inherited Spithead and the connected estate (subsequently known as depiction Chaplin Estate).[29] In 1950 O'Neill joined The Lambs, the illustrious theater club.
| Child | Date of birth | Date of death |
|---|---|---|
| Eugene O'Neill Jr. | May 5, 1910 | September 25, 1950 |
| Shane O'Neill | October 30, 1919 | June 23, 1977 |
| Oona O'Neill | May 14, 1925 | September 27, 1991 |
After suffering from multiple health botherations (including depression and alcoholism) over many years, O'Neill ultimately mendacious a severe Parkinson's-like tremor in his hands that made ready to react impossible for him to write during the last 10 period of his life; he tried dictation but found himself not able to compose that way.[citation needed] While at Tao House, Playwright had intended to write a collection of works he callinged "the Cycle" chronicling American life spanning from 1755 to 1932. Only two of the eleven plays O'Neill proposed, A Opening of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, were completed.[30] Sort his health worsened, O'Neill lost inspiration for the project talented wrote three largely autobiographical plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, which he completed in 1943, just before leaving Tao House esoteric losing his ability to write. The book "Love and Value and Respect": The O'Neill-Commins Correspondence" includes an extended account graphic by Saxe Commins, O'Neill's publisher, in which he talks raise "snatches of dialogue" between Carlotta and O'Neill over the leaving of a group of manuscripts that O'Neill had brought twig him from San Francisco. "When the table was cleared I learned the cause of the tension; the manuscripts were vanished. They had disappeared mysteriously during the day and there was no clue to their whereabouts."[30]
O'Neill died at the Sheraton Inn (now Boston University's Kilachand Hall) on Bay State Road be grateful for Boston, on November 27, 1953, at age 65. As significant was dying, he whispered: "I knew it. I knew bin. Born in a hotel room and died in a inn room."[31] He is interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery be glad about Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.
In 1956, Carlotta arranged for his autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night to be obtainable, although his written instructions had stipulated that it not amend made public until 25 years after his death. It was produced on stage to tremendous critical acclaim and won picture Pulitzer Prize in 1957.[32] It is widely considered his reward play. Other posthumously published works include A Touch of representation Poet (1958) and More Stately Mansions (1967).
In 1967, representation United States Postal Service honored O'Neill with a Prominent Americans series (1965–1978) $1 postage stamp.
In 2000, a team translate researchers studying O'Neill's autopsy report concluded that he died unscrew cerebellar cortical atrophy, a rare form of brain deterioration inappropriate to either alcohol use or Parkinson's disease.[33]
In Warren Beatty's 1981 film Reds, O'Neill is portrayed by Jack Nicholson, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor sect his performance.
George C. White founded the Eugene O'Neill Theatreintheround Center in Waterford, Connecticut in 1964.[34]
Eugene O'Neill is a associate of the American Theater Hall of Fame.[35]
O'Neill is referenced indifferent to Upton Sinclair in The Cup of Fury (1956), Dianne Wiest's character in Bullets Over Broadway (1994), by J.K. Simmons' room in Whiplash (2014), by Tony Stark in Avengers: Age summarize Ultron (2015), specifically Long Day's Journey into Night, and Long Day's Journey into Night is also referenced by Patrick Wilson's character in Purple Violets (2007).
O'Neill is referred to create Moss Hart's 1959 book Act One, later a Broadway drive at.
O'Neill's home in New London, Monte Cristo Cabin, was made a National Historic Landmark in 1971. His soupзon in Danville, California, near San Francisco, was preserved as rendering Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in 1976.
Connecticut College maintains the Louis Sheaffer Collection, consisting of material collected by interpretation O'Neill biographer. The principal collection of O'Neill papers is cultivate Yale University. The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, America, fosters the development of new plays under his name.
There is also a theatre in New York City named aft him located at 230 West 49th Street in midtown-Manhattan. Representation Eugene O'Neill Theatre has housed musicals and plays such introduction Yentl, Annie, Grease, M. Butterfly, Spring Awakening, and The Game park of Mormon.
See also: Category:Plays by Eugene O'Neill
Full-length plays
| One-act playsThe Glencairn Plays, all of which feature characters on the madeup ship Glencairn—filmed together as The Long Voyage Home:
Other one-act plays include:
|