|
Eugene O’Neill |
|
Playwright, born 1888 in New York City, USA. Born into a volatile theatrical family, his education was fragmented, and for six years he went to sea, living the life of a tramp at docksides, and making an attempt at suicide. After a spell in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, he began writing plays as a means of making sense of his disturbed emotions. He was sent to study play-writing at Harvard (1914), and joined the Provincetown Players in 1915, for whom Beyond the Horizon (1920, Pulitzer) was written. The most widely produced and translated US playwright of his time, he gained three more Pulitzer Prizes - for Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), and his masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night (published posthumously, 1956). Other classics include Desire Under The Elms (1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and The Iceman Cometh (1946). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, the first US dramatist to be thus honoured. O'Neill passed away in 1953. |