Eugene O’Neill: America’s Greatest Playwright – Speed Read

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Universally acclaimed as America’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill was born and  brought up in 1888 in the heart of the theater district in New York City. As the son of an actor, he had early exposure to the world of theater. He attended Princeton University briefly in 1906, but he returned to New York to work in a variety of jobs before joining a crew of a freighter as a seaman. Upon returning from voyages to South America and South Africa, he was hospitalized for 6 months to get over tuberculosis. While he was recovering, he determined to write a play about his adventures on the sea.

He went to Harvard, where he set out the one-act Bound East for Cardiff. It was produced in 1916 on Cape Cod by the Provincetown Players, an experimental group that was later to settle in the famous Greenwich Village theater district in New York City. The Players put out several more of his one-acts in the years between 1916-1920. With the full-length play Beyond the Horizon, produced on Broadway in 1920, O’Neill’s success was assured. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for the best play of the year. O’Neill was to be awarded the prize again in 1922, 1928, and 1957 for Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Although he did not receive the Pulitzer Prize for it, Mourning Becomes Electra, produced in 1931, is arguably his most lasting contribution to the American theater. In 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

O’Neill’s plays, forty-five in all, cover a wide range of dramatic subjects, but several themes show up, including the ambivalence of family relationships, the struggle between the sexes, the conflict between spiritual and material desires, and the vision of modern man as a victim of uncontrollable circumstances. Most of O’Neill’s characters are seeking meaning in their lives. According to his biographies, most of the characters were portraits of himself and his family. In a sense, his work chronicled his life.

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