ABOUT EUGENE O'NEILL

 

 


     In a New York City hotel room on Broadway the first cries of Eugene O’Neill were heard on October 16, 1888.  The family Eugene was born into was Irish American and very much Catholic.  James and Mary Ellen O’Neill were proud parents of their third child. Their oldest son “Jamie,” James Jr., was 10 years Eugene’s elder. Edmund was born in 1884 and died a year and a half later of measles.  

     James, a renowned actor, traveled the country playing the lead role in The Count of Monte Christo.  Traveling with her husband, the quiet Mary Ellen hated backstage life.  She developed a morphine addiction at the birth of Eugene that she would not overcome until 1914.  The family felt that Eugene was the cause of her addiction and if he had not been born she would not have become addicted to morphine.   

     Eugene went to Catholic boarding schools until he entered Princeton University in 1906. He was expelled in the spring semester for a drunken prank, throwing a beer bottle through the university president’s window. 

     After Princeton, Eugene went to work in New York for a little more than a year.  In October of 1909 he married Kathleen Jenkins.  He deserted her two weeks later to go on a gold hunting expedition to Honduras.  Within six months he contracted Malaria and had to return home to New York.  When he became healthy he set out on the seas as an able seaman.  Porting in Buenos Aries he became acquainted with the docks and the down and out.  During this period Kathleen gave birth to Eugene O’Neill Jr. in May of 1910. 

     Eventually Eugene made his way back to New York.  There he lived in a hole in the wall waterfront joint know as “Jimmy the Priest’s.” During this time he agreed to divorce Kathleen.  While living there he tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of veronal.  He was saved by his friends, and took a job in his father’s play company.  At the end of the season the O’Neills returned to the family’s summer home in New London Connecticut.  While there he worked as a reporter for the New London Telegraph. He was then diagnosed with tuberculosis.  On Christmas Eve of 1912 he entered Gaylord Farm Sanatorium for treatment.  He was discharged June 3, 1913.  This period of his life is the material that O’Neill drew on for Long Days Journey into Night, and is the crucial moment when he decided to become a playwright.

     Having decided to become a playwright Eugene attended professor George Pierce Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard.  He then spent his time between Greenwich Village, New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts writing plays.  In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton who bore him a son and daughter. 

     Eugene won his first Pulitzer Prize for Beyond the Horizon in 1920.  That same year his Father died of cancer.  His second Pulitzer came in 1922 for his play Anna Christie after his mother’s death of a stroke.  His brother died of chronic alcoholism at the age of 45 in 1923.  This set into motion O’Neill’s rise to prominence, his most productive period, which had reached its zenith in 1936 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

     It is during this period of great productivity he divorced Agnes on July 2, 1929.  Then on the 22 of the same month he married Carlotta Monterey.  Before O’Neill’s death Eugene jr. committed suicide in 1950.  Due to the sensitive nature of the material in Long Days Journey into Night Eugene Sr. did not want it published or produced until 25 years after his death.  Carlotta was able to produce the play much earlier because of the death of Eugene Jr. 

     As Eugene O'Neill lay dying of pneumonia his last words were, "Born in a hotel room-and God Damn it-died in a hotel room!" O'Neill died on November 27, 1953. He was posthumously awarded his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Days Journey into Night in 1957.