A number of books contain selections of his correspondence and research libraries, notably that of Yale University, hold significant collections of his papers. Many recent critical studies of O’Neill’s plays have been enriched by reference to this biographical record. But such riches create their own interpretive problems. As will be seen in the commentary on individual plays, many of the author’s works grow out of personal experience. In many ways, O’Neill’s use of autobiographical elements marks a departure from dramaturgical practice in the years before he began writing. If we survey the major works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama in America, we might see portraits of a world somewhat like that the author knew, but rarely the intimate details of personal life inscribed in drama. If we take but one example, Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845), a reader might see how the drawing room world of the Tiffanys would be familiar to the elite-born Mowatt and the use of French would reflect her own early childhood in Bordeaux. But Mowatt’s personal struggles, her husband’s failure in business, and her own illness find only the faintest of expressions in her popular play, if they can be seen at all. Thus the large-scale insertion of the personal marked a sea change in drama that redefined the drama of the 1900s.

Nevertheless, the hunt for the particularities of the playwright’s life can also lead to a critical distortion of his work. The tendency among many O’Neill scholars is to see O’Neill in the plays rather than see the plays for themselves. Of course, we cannot ignore information; once out in the public arena, biographical episodes become part of the general critical dialogue. Indeed, we cannot pretend, as extreme New Criticism used to, that things like personal lives of authors do not exist or have no bearing on the work. Yet even acknowledging that O’Neill’s real-life voyages play directly into his sea plays, for example, we can still search for elements of the play as play. Given the enormous amount of writing on the Tyrone-O’Neill connections in Long Day’s Journey, one has to work diligently and consciously not simply to read the play as O’Neill’s life on stage.

THE BEGINNING PLAYWRIGHT

The first and most lasting influence on O’Neill as a developing dramatist was the theater of his father. James O’Neill was one of the last of the old-style matinee idols, who traded in whatever credit he had toward being a wide-ranging actor to become a one-play celebrity. Monte Cristo resembles many another star vehicle of the nineteenth century—full of intrigue, action, stage business, and crowd-pleasing declamations, but notoriously short on complexity of character and subtlety of language. Not surprisingly, Eugene’s early plays reflect his proximity to the lingering melodrama of the late nineteenth century. This was a theater he absorbed as a stage brat, not one he consciously sought to emulate. One might even argue that his whole oeuvre is an attempt to write against his father’s stage, an attempt that only succeeded in transmuting Monte Cristo to modernist terms.

By the time O’Neill began writing plays in earnest, he knew the works of Shakespeare, the social realist dramas of Ibsen, the psychologically acute plays of Strindberg, and the Irish and German experimental theaters. Most notably, he saw that drama should do more than just entertain; it should seek after truths of human experience, uncomfortable though they be. In some ways, he is the inheritor of ideas propounded in the 1890s by James Herne, author of the first modern American drama, Margaret Fleming (1890). In an 1897 article for Arena, Herne called for an “art for truth’s sake” aesthetic, one that suborned the beautiful for its own sake and replaced it with the often rough, but far truer elements of life as it is lived. Herne’s understanding of drama leaned toward socialism, and, as we have seen, many of O’Neill’s early associations in New York were with political radicals. Although he never became a truly political playwright, O’Neill often blended dimensions of both the melodramatic and modernist stages with philosophy (primarily Nietzschean), politics, and plain life observed. These early plays show him experimenting with the proportions of his influences as he strives for a voice all his own.

FIRST PLAYS

Eugene O’Neill decided to become a playwright while a patient at the Gaylord Sanatorium. There he dashed off what he later dismissively referred to as a vaudeville skit, A Wife for a Life, sometime in spring 1913. In one act, an Older Man, a miner, learns that Jack, his younger companion, is in love with a woman whom he realizes is his estranged wife. The Older Man reacts silently to this news, making the sort of grimaces that audiences for over a century recognized as part and parcel of the popular theater. A telltale artifact (that is, an object in a play, like a will in a melodrama, that increases in meaning over the narrative), a telegram from Yvette, the woman for whom the men are rivals, also plays its usual revelatory role. In the end, without telling Jack that the presumed lout of a husband is himself, the Older Man symbolically relinquishes his claim to his wife with the line, “Greater love hath no man than this that he giveth his wife for his friend” (Complete Plays 1:11).