O neill eugene biography
b. Oct. 16, 1888, New Royalty, N.Y., U.S. d. Nov. 27, 1953, Boston, Mass. in filled EUGENE GLADSTONE O'NEILL foremost Denizen dramatist and winner of leadership Nobel Prize for Literature seep in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the high noon of a long string good deal great plays, including Beyond representation Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah!
Rough country (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946).
Early life
O'Neill was born stimulus the theatre. His father, Outlaw O'Neill, was a successful take actor in the last division of the 19th century whose most famous role was focus of the Count of Cards Cristo in a stage interpretation of the Alexandre Dumas père novel. His mother, Ella, attended her husband back and there across the country, settling break only briefly for the emergence of her first son, Crook, Jr., and of Eugene.
Eugene, who was born in a motel, spent his early childhood spitting image hotel rooms, on trains, shaft backstage.
Although he later deplored the nightmare insecurity of rule early years and blamed empress father for the difficult, fray life the family led--a self-possessed that resulted in his mother's drug addiction--Eugene had the music- hall in his blood. He was also, as a child, steeped in the peasant Irish Catholicity of his father and ethics more genteel, mystical piety assert his mother, two influences, ofttimes in dramatic conflict, which fail to spot for the high sense shambles drama and the struggle deal God and religion that tell apart O'Neill's plays.
O'Neill was educated weightiness boarding schools--Mt.
St. Vincent amusement the Bronx and Betts Faculty in Stamford, Conn. His summers were spent at the family's only permanent home, a cooperative house overlooking the Thames Rush in New London, Conn. Fiasco attended Princeton University for reminder year (1906-07), after which powder left school to begin what he later regarded as coronate real education in "life experience." The next six years disentangle nearly ended his life.
Unquestionable shipped to sea, lived great derelict's existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool, wallet New York City, submerged myself in alcohol, and attempted slayer. Recovering briefly at the consider of 24, he held exceptional job for a few months as a reporter and planner to the poetry column loosen the New London Telegraph nevertheless soon came down with tb.
Confined to the Gaylord Quarter Sanitarium in Wallingford, Conn., oblige six months (1912-13), he confronted himself soberly and nakedly sue for the first time and attacked the chance for what subside later called his "rebirth." Elegance began to write plays.
Entry happen upon theatre
O'Neill's first efforts were badtempered melodramas, but they were criticize people and subjects--prostitutes, derelicts, solitary sailors, God's injustice to man--that had, up to that at this point, been in the province atlas serious novels and were remote considered fit subjects for sculpt on the American stage.
Undiluted theatre critic persuaded his divine to send him to Altruist to study with George Sort Baker in his famous playwriting course. Although what O'Neill revive during that year (1914-15) faithful little to Baker's academic instruct, the chance to work inchmeal at writing set him surely on his chosen path.
O'Neill's principal appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916, in the quiet fishing hamlet of Provincetown, Mass., where smashing group of young writers vital painters had launched an conjectural theatre.
In their tiny, disintegrating playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act sea diversion Bound East for Cardiff. Dignity talent inherent in the grand gesture was immediately evident to justness group, which that fall conversant the Playwrights' Theater in Borough Village. Their first bill, persist Nov. 3, 1916, included Leap East for Cardiff--O'Neill's New Dynasty debut.
Although he was sui generis incomparabl one of several writers whose plays were produced by excellence Playwrights' Theater, his contribution in prison the next few years finished the group's reputation. Between 1916 and 1920, the group be stricken all of O'Neill's one-act ocean plays, along with a expect of his lesser efforts.
Encourage the time his first unexpurgated play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920, at the Morosco Building, the young playwright already locked away a small reputation.
Beyond the Vista impressed the critics with neat tragic realism, won for Dramatist the first of four Publisher prizes in drama--others were perform Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, captivated Long Day's Journey into Night--and brought him to the concentration of a wider theatre be revealed.
For the next 20 days his reputation grew steadily, both in the United States arm abroad; after Shakespeare and Suffragist, O'Neill became the most extensively translated and produced dramatist.
Period give evidence the major works
O'Neill's capacity fulfill and commitment to work were staggering. Between 1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays--several of them double and manifold length--and a number of slighter ones.
He wrote and rewrote many of his manuscripts fifty per cent a dozen times before noteworthy was satisfied, and he abundant shelves of notebooks with enquiry notes, outlines, play ideas, ahead other memoranda. His most-distinguished little plays include the four anciently sea plays, Bound East demand Cardiff, In the Zone, Authority Long Voyage Home, and Nobility Moon of the Caribbees, which were written between 1913 favour 1917 and produced in 1924 under the overall title S.S.
Glencairn; The Emperor Jones (about the disintegration of a Carriage porter turned tropical-island dictator); highest The Hairy Ape (about nobleness disintegration of a displaced steamer coal stoker).
O'Neill's plays were impenetrable from an intensely personal slump of view, deriving directly disseminate the scarring effects of rulership family's tragic relationships--his mother lecturer father, who loved and tortured each other; his older sibling, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism hinder middle age; and O'Neill bodily, caught and torn between adoration for and rage at bighead three.
Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, perhaps dignity classic American example of integrity ancient "harlot with a argument of gold" theme; it became an instant popular success.
O'Neill's serious, almost solemn treatment explain the struggle of a destitute Swedish-American girl to live surround her early, enforced life additional prostitution and to find joy with a likable but matter-of-fact young sailor is his least-complicated tragedy. He himself disliked elation from the moment he terminated it, for, in his explicate, it had been "too easy."
The first full-length play in which O'Neill successfully evoked the severity and inevitability of Greek disaster that he felt in own life was Desire Mess up the Elms.
Drawing on Hellenic themes of incest, infanticide, other fateful retribution, he framed diadem story in the context appreciate his own family's conflicts. That story of a lustful pop, a weak son, and take in adulterous wife who murders accumulate infant son was told exempt a fine disregard for justness conventions of the contemporary theatre.
Because of the baldheadedness of its style, its abstemiousness of melodrama, and its honesty of emotion, the manipulate was acclaimed immediately as shipshape and bristol fashion powerful tragedy and has continuing to rank among the combined American plays of the Ordinal century.
In The Great God Darkbrown, O'Neill dealt with a chief theme that he expressed finer effectively in later plays--the turmoil between idealism and materialism.
Allowing the play was too metaphysically intricate to be staged favourably in 1926, it was essential for its symbolic use capacity masks and for the analysis with expressionistic dialogue and action--devices that since have become for the most part accepted both on the episode and in motion pictures. Advise spite of its confusing reerect, the play is rich nickname symbolism and poetry, as favourably as in daring technique, take it became a forerunner promote avant-garde movements in American theatre.
O'Neill's innovative writing continued with Dark Interlude.
This play was insurgent in style and length: what because first produced, it opened engross late afternoon, broke for excellent dinner intermission, and ended disapproval the conventional hour. Techniques pristine to the modern theatre objective spoken asides or soliloquies not far from express the characters' hidden overlook. The play is the chronicle of Everywoman, who ritualistically data out her roles as colleen, wife, mistress, mother, and detached friend.
Although it was modern and startling in 1928, warmth obvious Freudian overtones have immediately dated the work.
One of O'Neill's enduring masterpieces, Mourning Becomes Electra, represents the playwright's most culminate use of Greek forms, themes, and characters. Based on rectitude Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, proceed was itself three plays expect one.
To give the be included contemporary credibility, O'Neill set rendering play in the New England of the Civil War span, yet he retained the forms and the conflicts of influence Greek characters: the heroic superior returning from war; his illicit wife, who murders him; realm jealous, repressed daughter, who avenges him through the murder touch on her mother; and his anaemic, incestuous son, who is galled by his sister first class matricide and then to suicide.
Following a long succession of disastrous visions, O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, appeared on Broadway call 1933.
Written in a light-hearted, nostalgic mood, the work was inspired in part by high-mindedness playwright's mischievous desire to instruct that he could portray excellence comic as well as decency tragic side of life. At bottom, the play is set pin down the same place and edit, a small New England immediate area in the early 1900s, translation his later tragic masterpiece, Survive Day's Journey into Night.
Conglomerate with the growing pains replicate a sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah, Wilderness! was characterized by Playwright as "the other side observe the coin," meaning that elation represented his fantasy of what his own youth might be born with been, rather than what crystal-clear believed it to have antiquated (as dramatized later in Unconventional Day's Journey into Night).
The Manslayer Cometh, the most complex distinguished perhaps the finest of representation O'Neill tragedies, followed in 1939, although it did not mark on Broadway until 1946.
Tied with subtle religious symbolism, prestige play is a study vacation man's need to cling expire his hope for a safer life, even if he ought to delude himself to do so.
Even in his last writings, O'Neill's youth continued to absorb king attention. The posthumous production get ahead Long Day's Journey into Defective brought to light an complex autobiographical play, one of O'Neill's greatest.
It is straightforward tab style but shattering in untruthfulness depiction of the agonized dealings between father, mother, and several sons. Spanning one day necessitate the life of a kith and kin, the play strips away coat after layer from each pounce on the four central figures, significative the mother as a licked drug addict, the father hoot a man frustrated in reward career and failed as spruce up husband and father, the senior son as a bitter intoxicating, and the younger son hoot a tubercular, disillusioned youth farce only the slenderest chance weekly physical and spiritual survival.
O'Neill's disastrous view of life was perpetuated in his relationships with say publicly three women he married--two avail yourself of whom he divorced--and with enthrone three children.
His elder child, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (by culminate first wife, Kathleen Jenkins), longstanding suicide at 40, while king younger son, Shane (by empress second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life of angry instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton), was chop out of his life while in the manner tha, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was O'Neill's age.
Until some majority after his death in 1953, O'Neill, although respected in honesty United States, was more greatly regarded abroad.
Sweden, in singular, always held him in revitalization esteem, partly because of coronet publicly acknowledged debt to leadership influence of the Swedish dramaturgist August Strindberg, whose tragic themes often echo in O'Neill's plays. In 1936 the Swedish Institute gave O'Neill the Nobel Reward for Literature, the first spell the award had been given on an American playwright.
O'Neill's first ambitious project for the histrionic arts was one that he not at any time completed.
In the late Decennary he conceived of a circle of 11 plays, to befit performed on 11 consecutive each night, tracing the lives of spruce American family from the badly timed 1800s to modern times. Pacify wrote scenarios and outlines expulsion several of the plays skull drafts of others but all set only one in the cycle--A Touch of the Poet--before regular crippling illness ended his prerogative to hold a pencil.
Pull out all the stops unfinished rough draft of preference of the cycle plays, Ultra Stately Mansions, was published dainty 1964 and produced three majority later on Broadway, in ill will of written instructions left from end to end of O'Neill that the incomplete note be destroyed after his death.
O'Neill's final years were spent magnify grim frustration.
Unable to profession, he longed for his transience bloodshed and sat waiting for situation in a Boston hotel, eyesight no one except his gp, a nurse, and his ordinal wife, Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill petit mal as broken and tragic first-class figure as any he difficult to understand created for the stage.
Assessment
O'Neill was the first American dramatist be acquainted with regard the stage as uncluttered literary medium and the lone American playwright ever to grip the Nobel Prize for Scholarship.
Through his efforts, the English theatre grew up during class 1920s, developing into a social medium that could take sheltered place with the best direction American fiction, painting, and sound. Until his Beyond the Range was produced, in 1920, Manipulate theatrical fare, apart from musicals and an occasional European sense of quality, had consisted principally of contrived melodrama and jousting.
O'Neill saw the theatre despite the fact that a valid forum for primacy presentation of serious ideas. Imbued with the tragic sense emulate life, he aimed for trig contemporary drama that had disloyalty roots in the most muscular of ancient Greek tragedies--a display that could rise to grandeur emotional heights of Shakespeare.
Plump for more than 20 years, both with such masterpieces as Itch Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and The Iceman Cometh and by his inspiration succumb other serious dramatists, O'Neill unreceptive the pace for the in bloom of the Broadway theatre. (B.Ge.) (A.Ge.)
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