Eugene O'Neill
From Philosopedia
O’Neill, Eugene Gladstone (16 October 1888 - 27 November 1953)
When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, O'Neill submitted the following autobiography:
- Born October 16th, 1888, in New York City. Son of James O'Neill, the popular romantic actor. First seven years of my life spent mostly in hotels and railroad trains, my mother accompanying my father on his tours of the United States, although she never was an actress, disliked the theatre, and held aloof from its people.
- From the age of seven to thirteen attended Catholic schools. Then four years at a non-sectarian preparatory school, followed by one year (1906-1907) at Princeton University.
- After expulsion from Princeton I led a restless, wandering life for several years, working at various occupations. Was secretary of a small mail order house in New York for a while, then went on a gold prospecting expedition in the wilds of Spanish Honduras. Found no gold but contracted malarial fever. Returned to the United States and worked for a time as assistant manager of a theatrical company on tour. After this, a period in which I went to sea, and also worked in Buenos Aires for the Westinghouse Electrical Co., Swift Packing Co., and Singer Sewing Machine Co. Never held a job long. Was either fired quickly or left quickly. Finished my experience as a sailor as able-bodied seaman on the American Line of transatlantic liners. After this, was an actor in vaudeville for a short time, and reporter on a small town newspaper. At the end of 1912 my health broke down and I spent six months in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
- Began to write plays in the Fall of 1913. Wrote the one-act Bound East for Cardiff in the Spring of 1914. This is the only one of the plays written in this period which has any merit.
- In the Fall of 1914, I entered Harvard University to attend the course in dramatic technique given by Professor George Baker. I left after one year and did not complete the course.
- The Fall of 1916 marked the first production of a play of mine in New York - Bound East for Cardiff - which was on the opening bill of he Provincetown Players. In the next few years this theatre put on nearly all of my short plays, but it was not until 1920 that a long play 'Beyond the Horizon was produced in New York. It was given on Broadway by a commercial management - but, at first, only as a special matinee attraction with four afternoon performances a week. However, some of the critics praised the play and it was soon given a theatre for a regular run, and later on in the year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I received this prize again in 1922 for Anna Christie and for the third time in 1928 for Strange Interlude.
- The following is a list of all my published and produced plays which are worth mentioning, with the year in which they were written:
- Bound East for Cardiff (1914), Before Breakfast (1916), The Long Voyage Home (1917), In the Zone (1917), The Moon of the Carabbees (1917), Ile (1917), The Rope (1918), Beyond the Horizon (1918), The Dreamy Kid (1918), Where the Cross is Made (1918), The Straw (1919), Gold (1920), Anna Christie (1920}, The Emperor Jones (1920), Different (1920), The First Man (1921), The Fountain (1921-22), The Hairy Ape (1921 ), Welded (1922), All God's Chillun Got Wings (1923), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Marco Millions (1923-25), The Great God Brown (1925), Lazarus Laughed (1926), Strange Interlude (1926-27), Dynamo (1928 ), Mourning Becomes Electra (1929-31) , Ah, Wilderness (1932), Days Without End (1932-33).
Items that O'Neill could have included or happened afterwards:
- He was born in a New York City hotel room. A plaque in his honor was mistakenly installed by Mayor Abe Beame and other dignitaries on the same block but at the northeast, rather than the southeast, corner of Manhattan’s 44th and Broadway. Tennessee Williams had arrived at the correct corner before discovering the officials’ mistake;
- He contracted malaria in Honduras (1909) and worked for a time in Argentina and South Africa;
- His first play, The Web (1913–1914), was followed by managing with Robert Edmond Jones the Greenwich Village Theatre (1923–1927) and being director of the Provincetown Players. At that 133 MacDougal Street playhouse where his one-act plays were produced, troupes took turns being star, usher, and ticket-taker.
- In The Dynamo, O’Neill clearly shows that he had rejected the Catholic faith in which he was reared. The dynamo of the title is an electrical one that becomes a divine symbol, replacing the old God but destroying its worshipers;
- He is known to have been influenced strongly by Schopenhauer.
- His works appeal by their describing the plight of oppressed people in many places; and by using stream-of-consciousness, literary realism, naturalism, and (chiefly Freudian) expressionism;
- The Great God Brown affirmed a pagan idealism combined with a tragic view of contemporary materialism, in which symbolic masks are used;
- Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) adapted a Greek theme and used fate in its theme;
- The religion-rationalism conflict was taken up in two works: Dynamo depicts an electrical dynamo which replaces the old God but which destroys its worshippers; and the hero of Days Without End (1934) is irresistibly attracted to Catholicism.
- The Iceman Cometh (1946) is deliberately pessimistic, presenting man as possessor merely of hopeless illusions and the certainty of death.
- Of his various works, Long Day’s Journey into Night is the most autobiographical, describing as it does his addictive mother who was an ex-matinée idol, his drunk brother, and himself Freudianly depicted as trapped in such a brooding family.
- In 1953, suffering from a disease that affected the coordination between the nerves and the muscles, which was leading to a steady deterioration of his bodily functions, O’Neill on several occasions informed his wife Carlotta that he was going to jump from his hotel window into the Charles River, which flowed below.
According to biographer Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill about two months before his death told his wife, “When I’m dying, don’t let a priest or Protestant minister or Salvation Army captain near me. Let me die in dignity. Keep it as simple and brief as possible. No fuss, no man of God there. If there is a God, I’ll see him and we’ll talk things over.”
At the end of November, an infection set in and close to the end O’Neill cried out, “I knew it! I knew it! Born in a hotel room and, goddamn it, dying in a hotel room!”
