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Eugene O’ Neill was born on October 16, 1888. He was the son of
actor James O’ Neill and Ella Quinlan O’ Neill. Because of his father’s profession, O’Neill was sent to several Catholic boarding schools where he discovered his passion in reading (Seymour-Smith 1969). The early years in O’Neill’s life were mainly affected by his mother’s mental illness and her drug addiction and his violent relationship with his father. After being suspended from Princeton University, he embarked at life at sea, where he suffered from depression and alcoholism; during this period, O’ Neill lived as a beggar and tried committing suicide by overdosing on barbiturates. Soon after O’Neill’s parents and elder brother Jamie died which caused O’Neill to turn to writing as a form of escape. It wasn’t until he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1912, that he decided to devote himself as a full time playwright (Poupard 156). This turning point in O’ Neill’s life made him become one of the most promising playwrights and helped him start gaining an international reputation by 1920. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. O’ Neill had two unsuccessful marriages, one with Kathleen Jenkins, with whom he had one son, Eugene Jr. and another with Agnes Boulton with whom he had a daughter named Oona and a son named Shane (Jensen 163). His third wife, Carlotta Monterey was the one he loved and spent the remainder of his life with. She helped guard his privacy typed his manuscripts until he was forced to give up writing due to his illnesses. Eugene O’ Neill died in a Boston hotel room on November 28, 1953 in great pain. His last days, he was unable to walk or even feed himself sometimes. Not all of O’ Neill’s work has survived, but most of which has are structured mainly on guilt, betrayal, and accusations from experiences in his childhood. “His plays were torn from him, and they contained many grave flaws; but he showed the real grain of life. He was often met with hostile criticism…an apt word used frequently used to describe the effect of his work is “lacerating.” O’ Neill’s play A Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as a master piece and is considered one of the greatest dramatic works written by an American. This play of his, is an autobiographical play in which he it resembles O’Neill’s life in many aspects. O’Neill himself appears in the play in the character of Edmund, the younger son who, like O’Neill, suffers from tuberculosis (Poupard 156).    Read more...