Eugene O'Neill

His father James played the Count of Monte Cristo across America for decades and his mother went with him, which is how a boy came to be born in a Broadway hotel room and boarded out at seven to a Catholic school in the Bronx. Ella O'Neill had been given morphine for the pain of that birth and never got off it. James drank. Princeton lasted a year — the accounts of why he left do not agree — and then he went to sea, joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Wobblies, and came back to New York broke. In 1912 he tried to kill himself in a waterfront saloon's upstairs room, then caught tuberculosis. He decided in the sanatorium to write plays. He called it a rebirth.

He studied a year under George Pierce Baker at Harvard in 1914 and left. In the summer of 1916 the Provincetown Players read Bound East for Cardiff aloud in a living room off the wharf, staged it, and then took him downtown to MacDougal Street. What followed was an American theater that had not existed before: characters who spoke in vernacular, and who were sailors, prostitutes, stokers and drunks. Beyond the Horizon opened on Broadway in 1920 and took the Pulitzer. The Emperor Jones came the same year, then Anna Christie in 1922, Desire Under the Elms in 1924, Strange Interlude in 1928, Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931. In 1936 he took the Nobel Prize in Literature and spent much of the acceptance speech on Strindberg, whose debt he wanted acknowledged publicly and in Sweden.

He reproduced the household he came out of. His parents and his brother Jamie, who drank himself dead at 45, all died within three years of one another just as his name was being made. In 1929 he left Agnes Boulton and their two children for the actress Carlotta Monterey and married her within a month of the divorce. In 1943 he disowned his daughter Oona, who was 18, for marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was 54. He never saw her again, and never met any of the eight grandchildren she had. Eugene Jr., a Yale classicist and an alcoholic, killed himself in 1950 at 40. Shane became a heroin addict, sold the furniture out of the family house in Bermuda, was disowned in his turn, and years later jumped from a window.

A tremor took his hands in the 1940s and he could not write for the last decade of his life. Dictation did not work. A cycle of 11 plays covering American life from 1755 to 1932 produced two. He died in a Boston hotel room on November 27, 1953, and researchers reading his autopsy report in 2000 concluded the cause was cerebellar cortical atrophy, a rare brain deterioration unconnected to drink or to Parkinson's. He had left written instructions that Long Day's Journey into Night stay unpublished for 25 years. Carlotta released it in 1956. It won a fourth Pulitzer in 1957 and a Tony, and it is now the play the whole reputation rests on.

Eugene O'Neill's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bound East for Cardiff other
  Staged by the Provincetown Players on a wharf. The first of his plays anyone produced 1916
• Beyond the Horizon other
  His Broadway debut and his first Pulitzer 1920
• The Emperor Jones other
  Began downtown, moved to Broadway, and glanced at the American occupation of Haiti 1920
• Mourning Becomes Electra other
  The Oresteia moved to New England after the Civil War 1931
• The Iceman Cometh other
  Produced after a ten-year silence, out of the saloons where he had nearly died 1946
• Long Day's Journey into Night other
  Written by 1942, published against his instructions, Pulitzer 1957 1956

• October 16, 1888 aged 0 Born in a hotel on what was then Longacre Square The site is now 1500 Broadway, at the north end of Times Square.
• 1895 aged ~7 Sent at seven to a Catholic boarding school in the Bronx while his parents tour
• 1912 aged ~24 Attempts suicide in a waterfront boarding house, then contracts tuberculosis He decided in the sanatorium to become a playwright. I want to be an artist or nothing, he said.
• 1916 aged ~28 The Provincetown Players stage Bound East for Cardiff
• 1920 aged ~32 Beyond the Horizon opens on Broadway and wins the Pulitzer
• July 2, 1929 aged 40 Divorced from Agnes Boulton after leaving her and their children He married Carlotta Monterey less than a month later.
• 1936 aged ~48 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature He gave much of the acceptance speech to August Strindberg.
• 1943 aged ~55 Disowns his daughter Oona, 18, for marrying Charlie Chaplin He never saw her again.
• November 27, 1953 aged 65 Dies in a Boston hotel room at 65 Accounts of the deathbed report him saying he had been born in a hotel room and was dying in one.

• Charlie Chaplin 1889–1977
  British-American actor and filmmaker whose Tramp character became an icon of the silent film era. son-in-law he refused to meet
• Arthur Miller 1915–2005
  Playwright whose Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are cornerstones of American drama. successor in American tragedy
• Tennessee Williams 1911–1983
  Playwright whose A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof defined American theater. inherited the American stage
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. wrote about his drinking in The Cup of Fury