Terry Carlin reported that O'Neill arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays", but this was an exaggeration. His involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. O'Neill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds, about the life of John Reed Louise Bryant was portrayed by Diane Keaton. O'Neill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. ĭuring the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he also befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of America founder John Reed. In the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by George Piece Baker, but left after one year. O'Neill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie (who drank himself to death at the age of 45) died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater.Īfter 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 going to the sanatorium are dramatized in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night). O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which was fighting for improved living conditions for the working class using quick 'on the job' direct action. Despite this, he had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression, alcoholism and dereliction. He may have been dropped for attending too few classes, been suspended for "conduct code violations", or "for breaking a window", or according to a more concrete but possibly apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle into the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson", the future president of the United States. He attended Princeton University for one year. He also briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford. The O'Neill family reunited for summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. In 1900, he became a day student at the De La Salle Institute on 59th Street in Manhattan. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Because his father was often on tour with a theatrical company, accompanied by Eugene's mother, in 1895 O'Neill was sent to St. His father suffered from alcoholism his mother from an addiction to morphine, prescribed to relieve the pains of the difficult birth of Eugene, who was her third son. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, who was also of Irish descent. The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which houses offices, shops and the ABC Studios. A commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957. O'Neill was born on Octoin a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, on what was then Longacre Square (now Times Square) in New York City. Statue of O'Neil as a boy, sitting and writing, overlooking the harbor of New London, Connecticut Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known ( Ah, Wilderness!). They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusion and despair. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (Octo– November 27, 1953) was an American playwright awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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