Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O’Neill is the greatest American playwright — a judgment that has not been seriously contested since his death in 1953 and that rests on a body of work whose emotional depth, structural ambition, and unflinching autobiographical honesty redefined what American drama could be. Before O’Neill, the American theatre was a commercial entertainment; after him, it was an art form. He brought expressionism, naturalism, and Greek tragedy to the Broadway stage; he won the Nobel Prize in Literature (the only American dramatist ever to do so) and four Pulitzer Prizes; and his posthumously produced Long Day’s Journey Into Night is widely regarded as the finest American play ever written — a work whose devastating portrait of his own tormented family has been called the most powerful act of self-examination in American literature.

The Actor’s Son

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in a hotel room on Broadway in 1888 — an appropriate birthplace for a man who would spend his life in the theatre. His father, James O’Neill, was a famous actor who had made and ruined his career by performing the lead in The Count of Monte Cristo thousands of times. His mother, Ella, was a morphine addict. His brother Jamie was an alcoholic. The family’s dynamics — the miserly father, the drugged mother, the self-destructive brother, the guilty son — would become the subject of O’Neill’s greatest play.

O’Neill’s early life was chaotic: a year at Princeton (expelled), a gold-prospecting trip to Honduras, years of drinking and drifting, a suicide attempt, and a stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium that gave him time to read Strindberg, Ibsen, and the great European dramatists who would become his models. He studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker at Harvard and wrote his first one-act plays for the Provincetown Players, the experimental theatre group in Provincetown, Massachusetts, that staged his earliest work.

The Early Plays

Beyond the Horizon (1920), O’Neill’s first full-length Broadway production, won the Pulitzer Prize and announced the arrival of a major dramatic talent. The Emperor Jones (1920) — an expressionistic one-act about a Black dictator’s psychological disintegration — was revolutionary in its use of drums, monologue, and the techniques of European expressionism. Anna Christie (1921) won a second Pulitzer.

The Hairy Ape (1922) was an expressionistic drama about a stoker on an ocean liner who discovers he belongs nowhere — neither in the engine room nor in polite society. Desire Under the Elms (1924), set on a New England farm, was a Greek tragedy transposed to nineteenth-century America — a story of infanticide, incest, and Oedipal desire that combined the stark dramaturgy of Euripides with the harsh realism of the New England landscape.

The Experimental Period

Strange Interlude (1928, Pulitzer Prize) was O’Neill’s most ambitious experiment — a nine-act, five-hour play in which the characters speak their inner thoughts in asides that the other characters cannot hear. It was a theatrical sensation and a commercial triumph. Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) transposed the Oresteia of Aeschylus to a New England mansion after the Civil War — a trilogy of plays about murder, guilt, and the inescapable power of family destiny.

Ah, Wilderness! (1933) was O’Neill’s only comedy — a warm, nostalgic portrait of small-town American adolescence that was, as O’Neill said, “the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been.”

The Late Masterpieces

After winning the Nobel Prize in 1936, O’Neill retreated from public life and spent a decade writing the plays that would become his greatest achievements.

The Iceman Cometh (1946) was set in a skid-row saloon whose inhabitants sustain themselves on “pipe dreams” — comforting illusions about the future — until a traveling salesman named Hickey arrives and tries to strip them of their illusions with catastrophic results. The play was a philosophical drama about the necessity of illusion, and its 1956 revival, directed by José Quintero with Jason Robards as Hickey, was one of the landmark productions in American theatrical history.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night was written in 1941 but not published or performed until 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death, in accordance with his wishes. The play was a direct, barely fictionalised account of a single day in the life of the Tyrone family — James the actor, Mary the morphine addict, Jamie the alcoholic, Edmund the consumptive — and its emotional power derives from O’Neill’s refusal to assign blame. Every character is simultaneously guilty and innocent, torturer and victim, and the play’s compassion for all of them is what makes it the masterpiece it is.

A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947) was O’Neill’s elegy for his brother Jamie — a play about a night of confession and absolution between a self-destructive alcoholic and the large, tender woman who loves him.

Collecting O’Neill

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Yale University Press, 1956) in first edition is the primary target. The Iceman Cometh (Random House, 1946) and Mourning Becomes Electra (Liveright, 1931) are also highly sought. Strange Interlude (Boni & Liveright, 1928), as a Pulitzer winner and commercial sensation, is collected. The Boni & Liveright and Liveright editions of the 1920s plays — published by O’Neill’s original house — are the foundation of any serious O’Neill collection. Signed copies exist but are uncommon; O’Neill was reclusive in his later years.