Eugene O’Neill

O’Neill was born in the Barrett Hotel in New York City, to Irish immigrant parents. His father was an alcoholic theater actor, and his mother was addicted to morphine. O’Neill’s parents sent him to boarding school at a young age, and he reunited with them occasionally at a cottage in Connecticut. His parents and elder brother all died from alcohol-related illness within a few years of each other, and O’Neill himself struggled with alcoholism and depression throughout his life. After attending Princeton University for one year, O’Neill left under ambiguous circumstances. Several rumors circulated about his departure, the wildest being that he was suspended after throwing a beer bottle at a professor. O’Neill later attended Harvard University for a year, before dropping out. In the 1900s, he frequented literary circles in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. And after recovering from tuberculosis in a sanitorium in 1913, he decided to devote his life to writing. O’Neill wrote over 50 plays in his lifetime, earning his first Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1920 for his play Beyond the Horizon. He won three subsequent Pulitzer Prizes in 1922, 1928, and 1957, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. O’Neill married twice and had two children, Shane and Oona. He disowned Oona after she married 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin at the age of 18, and he never saw his daughter again. His son, Shane, battled a Heroin addiction, and soon after O’Neill disowned him, Shane committed suicide by jumping out a window at the age of 40. Many of O’Neill’s plays center on dysfunctional family relationships, likely influenced by his own upbringing and subsequent family life. O’Neill spent his later years in the Loire Valley in France, and continued to write until he developed tremors in his hand that restricted his ability to write. O’Neill died in a hotel room in Boston from declining health related to alcoholism. Considered a great American playwright, O’Neill is particularly celebrated for his dark explorations of American culture, the family unit, and his revival of Ancient Greek tragic theater, transposed into modern American settings.