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Eugene O’Neill


Eugene O’Neill, born in New York City on October 16, 1888, was the first great American playwright. His father was James O’Neill, the famous dramatic actor, and during his early years, O’Neill often traveled with his parents. Beyond the Horizon (1920), the first of his plays to reach Broadway, won a Pulitzer Prize (he eventually won four) and opened the way for serious theatre in this country. In 1936 he became the only American playwright ever awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His major works include The Emperor Jones (1920); The Hairy Ape (1922); Desire Under the Elms (1924); The Great God Brown (1926); Strange Interlude (1928); Mourning Becomes Electra (1931); Ah, Wilderness! (1933); A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957); Hughie (1964); A Touch of the Poet (1967); and what most authorities consider his two greatest plays, The Iceman Cometh (1964) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, completed in 1941 but unproduced until three years after his death in 1953.