When he returned stateside, after a bout with malaria, he shipped out on a sailing vessel, the Charles Racine, not bothering to visit his wife or new son, Eugene Jr. This trip took him to Buenos Aires, an experience that haunts the fringes of some of his early plays like a nightmare; eventually, he departed South America on board a British steamer, the Ikala, the model for the SS Glencairn in several plays. He returned to New York in April 1911, without any interest in taking up again with Kathleen.

The next five years would be greatly formative for O’Neill the playwright. He lived for several months at a flophouse tavern run by James “Jimmy the Priest” Condon, fitting in last voyages as a seaman on the luxury liners New York and Philadelphia in 1911. After a suicide attempt at Condon’s in 1912, he spent more time with his parents in New London, Connecticut. The onset of tuberculosis led to commitment to a county sanatorium, then a private one, Gaylord, at the end of 1912. His months there, he said later, were the impetus to his becoming a playwright. Beginning with A Wife for a Life, O’Neill took to writing one-act and a few full-length plays, publishing five of his one-acts in 1914. In that year, too, he entered Harvard as a special student in George Pierce Baker’s English 47 class on playwriting, learning craft elements that remained with him his whole career. With his father in financial trouble, O’Neill left Harvard after the spring 1915 term, and returned to New York, resuming such long-term bad habits as heavy drinking and consorting with prostitutes.

In the summer of 1916, O’Neill and an anarchist friend, Terry Carlin, took a boat from Boston to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. There he met a group of writers and actors, the Provincetown Players, who hoped to challenge what they saw as a moribund American theater through new, more intimate forms of presentation. Led by George Cram Cook, his wife Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, and her husband Hutchins Hapgood, the group attracted a number of talented, innovative writers and artists, including Louise Bryant, with whom O’Neill would have an affair. For their second summer bill, played at the old wharf they had converted to a theater space, the group chose O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff; later, the Players put on an even earlier O’Neill play, Thirst. The combination of O’Neill’s compelling one-act maritime drama and a timely fog gave the group a sense that in their midst was someone with the force to carry out their program of theatrical reform.

For the next several years, O’Neill would retain connections with the Provincetown group. During winters, they would retreat to New York and put on seasons of plays there, in a small theater at 139, then later, 133 Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village. The group would eventually stage many of the plays printed in this volume. But O’Neill also began to move independently toward more ambitious works that would outgrow the Players. In 1918, he married again, this time to the prose writer Agnes Boulton and with whom he would have two children, Shane and Oona. By 1921, Beyond the Horizon, The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, and The Straw would all be in production, with The Hairy Ape following in 1922. O’Neill was now a nationally known innovator in the drama. Perhaps it is strangely fitting that as his success grew, his original family died—father in 1920, mother in 1922, and Jamie the year after. After 1923, O’Neill was alone with his ghosts, and the plays he wrote about them became world famous.

Following the acclaim he garnered for Desire under the Elms, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill in 1936 became the first American playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Despite this recognition, he struggled with a play cycle, then wrote several dramas, the fame of which was only achieved either after World War II or his death: The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Moon for the Misbegotten. By this time long divorced from Agnes and married to actress Carlotta Monterey, O’Neill went into a physical decline sparked by several conditions, including a thyroid problem and a tremor from what was diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease (though it appears to have been something rarer), not to mention whatever damage years of heavy alcohol abuse had done before he quit drinking in the late 1920s. Further problems developed from overmedication. With his writing career effectively at an end by 1944, O’Neill could only attend to the performance of Iceman in 1946 and his deteriorating family situation, which included the suicide of his son Eugene Jr.; the death of his grandson, Eugene III; the arrest of his son Shane for heroin possession; and his estrangement from daughter Oona over her marrying Charlie Chaplin. On November 27, 1953, he died as he was born, in a hotel, the irony of which O’Neill was well aware in his last hours.

 

No American playwright of the twentieth century has had the exhaustive biographical treatment that O’Neill has received. From Barrett H. Clark’s 1927 biography to the large works by Arthur and Barbara Gelb (1962; rev. 1973 and 2000), Louis Sheaffer (two volumes, 1968, 1973), and Stephen Black (1999)—to all of which I am indebted for information—as well as many smaller studies, scholars know the essential details of the author’s life.