Eugene O'Neill
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Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) was an American playwright, born in a New York hotel room, the son of the actor James O’Neill, who spent much of his career touring in The Count of Monte Cristo. After an unsettled youth, including years at sea and a bout of tuberculosis, he began writing plays, and his work was first staged by the Provincetown Players in 1916. He brought a new seriousness and ambition to the American theatre, experimenting with masks, interior monologue and Greek tragedy, and won four Pulitzer Prizes, for Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude and Long Day’s Journey into Night. In 1936 he became the first American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. His late masterpieces include The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, an autobiographical play staged only after his death in Boston in 1953.
