The Life of Eugene O'Neill

Born in the year 1888 on October the sixteenth, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill proved to be one of the most creative playwrights of the twentieth century. He was a man, who suffered from a troubled childhood, who I guess one might consider was living his life in search of an identity. Needless to say, he found his true passion in life after becoming a playwright in the early 1900's. By the time his career and life began to run out of time, he had already accomplished many goals that others could only wish that they had accomplished themselves. Through all of the hardships that life threw in his face, O'Neill was able to overcome the hardships and secure his place as one of the most successful playwrights that have touched foot on American soil.
As mentioned earlier, O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888 in the large city of New York. As he soon learned, being born into an Irish-Catholic family that was raised through the theatre industry was no fun at all. His parents were the great actor, James O'Neill and Ella O'Neill, a morphine addict.

He later grew up only to find that his mother's addiction was the direct result of his birth. Growing up, he attended several Catholic boarding schools while traveling around with his touring father, the first being Betts Academy in Stamford. A young genius of his time, O'Neill went on to attend Princeton University in his home state of Connecticut. Sadly, he was dismissed from the school after only one year of education because he was accused of a prank (Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill). Also stated earlier, O'Neill lived his life in search of an identity which gave him the opportunity to experience many new occupations while he was being raised. As seen in several of his writings, O'Neill was a man who enjoyed a great adventure which is most likely the reason why he ventured to Honduras in Central America to be a gold prospector. Unable to fulfill his fantasies, he then moved on to being a Norwegian seaman on a large freighter ship in Buenos Aires. As if he had had enough adventure for the time being, he moved back to his hometown in Massachusetts to work with his father's company. Here he worked as a box-office man and an agent while his father continued acting. Later, he found a job as a reporter for the New London Telegraph which is where he found his love for playwriting (Berney 442).

Do not be fooled, however, because these jobs were done over a stretch of about twenty years and gave O'Neill many troubles along the way. Though he grew up traveling with his father while on tour, he never really did get along with him while he was young; this goes for his relationship with his mother and his alcoholic brother as well. While searching for his identity, O'Neill was struck with several deadly diseases that he was forced to overcome, and for the sake of American theatre, it is a good thing that he was able to overcome these. The first of these diseases came in Honduras when O'Neill was infected with malaria. A few years after recovering, he was then hospitalized in the year 1912 when he was attacked with tuberculosis (Unger 387). Though he was not on the best terms with his drunken brother, who was also an actor at the time, many people believe that his brother was actually his influence for becoming a playwright in the early twentieth century. Not allowing these problems to bring him down, he was embarking on a new journey, to find the meaning in life (388).

O'Neill decided that in order for him to find out if theatre was the correct life for him to live, than he would need a second opinion. To find this, he enrolled in a writing workshop class at Harvard University in the year 1914, and he was taught by the professor George Pierce Baker. He had found it, his meaning in life, and it was to write plays. The class led him to join a group of amateur artists and writers known as the Provincetown Players. The group was a small theatrical company and proved to play an influential role in the so-called "little theatre" movement in the year 1912. The group performed in the state of Massachusetts and a New York theatre known as the Playwrights' Theatre (389).

Thus far, there seems to be one thing missing from O'Neill's life, love. In his adult life (because he had no time for a lover while growing up) O'Neill had three lovers and was married to all of them at different times. The first of these women was Kathleen Jenkins whom he married in the year 1909. After only two years, the couple decided to split, leaving their one child behind and leading him to eventually commit suicide at the age of forty. Looking for someone more like him, O'Neill later married a writer by the name of Agnes Boulton, whom he has two children with. The couple divided in the year 1929 which allowed O'Neill to act on his true love, a beautiful actress named Carlotta Monterey whom he married the same year (Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill).

He began his writing career as a One Act Play writer, eventually leading him to create a collage of over sixty plays which he titles "Thirst and Other One Act Plays." After deciding to step it up, he began writing full-length plays between the years of 1918 and 1924. Among his most famous plays were: Beyond the Horizon, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey into Night. Over the course of his career, he had written over forty-five full length plays. He had also watched the lives of those whom he called his family disappear. His father has passed away in the year 1921 from cancer, and over the next two years he saw his mother die and his brother die from a stroke. O'Neill has also lost all communication with his other two children he has while with Agnes. He did not consider his son Shane a son at all, and he lost his daughter to a marriage at the age of only eighteen. Suffering from various ailments, which some believed to be brain cancer, O'Neill became paralyzed and eventually died on November 27 in the year 1953 (Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill).

After several attempts of trying to get a play published, O'Neill finally gained success with his first published play titled Beyond the Horizon. As well as being his first published play, the play also earned O'Neill his first Pulitzer Prize and it was created in the year 1920. The play had a theme best described as "powerlessness before fate," and was centered in O'Neill's era of drama. Classified as a tragedy, the play is about two brothers, Andrew and Robert, one who married a young girl and was forced to work on a farm and be head of a household, and the other who gets to take a journey and becomes successful and wealthy, only to eventually lose all of his wealth. Robert envied Andrew because he was able to take the journey while Robert longed to live that life. Robert was a failure at the life he was forced to live which led him to his death, caused by tuberculosis. The play was his first Broadway success and it starred a popular actor of the time, Robert Mayo (Berney 445).

One of O'Neill's more naturalistic plays was titled Desire under the Elms, a play in which he used his third wife and the son of his second wife as inspiration. The play can be seen as a classic tragedy in which there was a boy named Eben and his father named Ephraim who is married to Eben's stepmother, Abbie. The story deals with much conflict; (which is believed to be based on 20th century concerns) for example; Abbie dislikes her husband and actually becomes attracted to her stepson, but not before conflict with him as well. Critics believed this play to be what made O'Neill a myth user and not a myth maker (Unger 392).

A second play that deals with the naturalism and realism of O'Neill is Strange Interlude. This was the longest play written by O'Neill; it consisted of nine acts, the last act not being added until seventeen years after he started writing it. When the play was shown at a theatre, it had to be divided by a dinner break of one hour and typically viewers would be at the theatre from five thirty until eleven at night. The story was about a woman named Nina who had lost her lover in World War One. She married another man but bared no children to him because insanity had run in his family. At the same time, she was having an affair with a wealthy man, eventually having a child with him. Ashamed of telling her husband, she kept it from him and her son until her husband died and her lover was lost to science. Later, her son left her because he had an interest in a girl. In the end, she was left to herself and was torn apart by her inner conflicts (394).

Not all of O'Neill's plays were tragedies, however, as in the case of the play Ah, Wilderness, which is considered a family comedy. This play was also made popular by a famous actor of the time, George M. Cohan who played the father of an adolescent child in O'Neill's home state of Connecticut (396). Later in his career, which some consider his final productive period; Long Day's Journey into Night was published by O'Neill. After an amazing comeback, this play won O'Neill his second Pulitzer Prize in the year 1957. He used realism once again in this play after making up with his brother and his father, (never his mother) and he learned to forget about his first marriage. The characters in this play are based off of people in his past experiences such as the dope addicted mother and once again, a return of the disease tuberculosis which of course O'Neill suffered from himself (Eugene(Gladstone) O'Neill).

One of O'Neill's most popular plays that he wrote was titled Mourning Becomes Electra. This play was based on the Orestean trilogy that was written by Aeschylus, and it proved to be a complete tragedy (Eugene O'Neill). The story takes place as the Civil War is coming to a conclusion and a father/son duo is on their way home from battle. The Mannon's are the family in the story consisting of Christine, the mother, Lavinia, the daughter, Ezra, the father, and Orin, his son. Lavinia and Christine are waiting for the men to return from the war, which is when the reader discovers that the two girls have a strong dislike for one another. Christine also informs the reader that she hates her husband as well, but she protects Orin with loving jealousy. Secretly, Christine is having an affair with a seaman named Captain Brant and when Lavinia finds out, she tells her to send him away and not to hurt her father. Instead, Christine plans to poison Ezra so that she can marry Brant, which is what she eventually does after having a fight with Ezra. With no proof that Christine killed him, Lavinia ran to Orin to inform him of the situation. Furious at his mother, Orin shot Captain Brant on his ship, which led to Christine shooting herself over the loss of him. With no one to care for them, they become involved with other lovers, Peter and Hazel Niles. The siblings grew apart and Lavinia turns evil by telling Orin that she plans to poison Peter and then telling Orin to go and kill himself, which he eventually did do. Not being able to live with herself, Lavinia did not marry Peter, but instead went back to the old house to live with her "dead" family (Magill 321-25). In my opinion, this was surely one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century.
O'Neill indeed made a large impact on other playwrights in the twentieth century. He gave his plays distinguishing characteristics and told them with high seriousness. His use of tragic irony and melodramatic situations along with his highly intellectual mind were emphasized directly through his pure dramatic talent. As stated by Mrs. Margaret Loftus Ranald, "[O'Neill] gave American theatre a unique sense of tragic human condition" (Berney 446). His true talent not only earned him the two Pulitzer Prizes, but also the Nobel Peace Prize for literature in 1936 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in 1922. Without O'Neill's inspiring work, dramatic tragedies of today would be nothing more than what they were before O'Neill enlightened the world with his imagination.

He was a man searching for his true identity and the meaning of life. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill found his purpose in this world and that was to relay his adventurous tales of life to the public through playwriting. He was able to survive a rough childhood, being kicked out of a prestigious university, traveling around the world with his uncaring family, two lethal diseases, and three marriages, and in the end be one of the most influential writers of his time. Not only did he overcome his hardships, but he was successful at what he did, as shown by his numerous awards won. Sadly, forty-five plays later, the tragic life of O'Neill came to an end leaving us all unknowing of what could have been if he has not succumbed to a brain disease. We are left only to imagine what the inspiring mind of O'Neill's would of gave us to delve into next.