EUGENE O'NEILL
( Oct 1888 -- Nov 1953 )
Perhaps it was a sign when O'Neill was born in a small hotel in the area that is now Times Square in Manhattan, hard by Broadway. (The site is now a Starbucks, with a plaque on the wall honoring O'Neill.) His father, James, was an Irish immigrant actor and, because of the unsettled lifestyle of his family, Eugene was sent to a Catholic boarding school, where he often retreated into the world of books. He entered Princeton University but left after his first year, for reasons unknown (but widely speculated on). After working for a time as a reporter and poetry contributor at the New London (Conn.) TELEGRAPH, he spent 1912 and 1913 in a tuberculosis sanitarium, where he decided to become a serious writer. He spent some years at sea, during which he suffered from alcoholism and depression. His first published play, Beyond the Horizon (1920, earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, one of four he was to receive. He also later was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His plays were among the first in America to reflect the "realism" style that characterized the plays of Anton Chekhov (Russia), Henrik Ibsen (Norway) and August Strindberg (Sweden). With the exception of Ah, Wilderness, his only comedy, all his plays are rather dark and pessimistic, peopled by characters existing at the edge of society, waiting for a better tomorrow that never comes. He produced 34 full-length plays and 20 one-act plays. Several of them, including Anna Christie, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh, continue to be staged again every few years, up to the present day.
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