Alcoholic Authors: Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
America's Foremost Dramatist Fought the Battle of Alcohol and Won
Sep 13, 2008
Eugene O’Neill was exposed to the theater from birth. His first efforts portrayed prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors and God’s injustice to man, not usually subjects for presentation on the American stage. O’Neill’s plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, derived from his family life.
Eugene O’Neill Early Life
Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16, 1888 to James and Ella O’Neill. His father was a successful touring actor accompanied by his wife. Eugene, the second of two sons, was born in a hotel room. His mother became a drug addict which Eugene blamed on the rough life the family lived. He was influenced by his Irish Catholic father and the gentle, mystical piety of his mother. O’Neill was educated in boarding schools and spent summers in a modest home in New London, Connecticut. He attended Princeton for one year (1906-07) after which he shipped out to sea
Eugene O’Neill the Dramatist
Eugene O’Neill first efforts were melodramas about prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors and God’s injustice to man, not considered fit subjects for the American stage. He attended George Pierce Baker’s playwriting classes at Harvard which set the course for his future dramatic endeavors.
O’Neill's plays debuted in New York on November 3, 1916. Between 1916 and 1920, the Playwrights’ Theater produced all of his one-act plays. Beyond the Horizon won the first of four Pulitizer Prizes which included Anna Christie, Strange Interlude and Long Day’s Journey into Night which brought him to the attention of a wider audience. His plays were written from his relationship with his family---parents who loved but tormented each other, his older brother, James Jr., who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age and O’Neill’s own rage caught between love and anger at all of them.
Eugene O’Neill Alcoholism and Cure
Eugene O’Neill began drinking heavily after he left Princeton University in 1907. During the next six years, he lived a derelict’s existence on the waterfront of Buenos Aires, Liverpool and New York City. He submerged himself in alcohol and attempted suicide. He recovered briefly at age 24, worked for a short time as a reporter and contributed to a poetry column for the New Long Telegram during which time he came down with tuberculosis. While spending six months at the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium, he confronted his alcoholism and experienced what he later called his “rebirth.” He then began writing plays. In addition to winning Pulitizer Prize, he also won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first time it was given to an American playwright.
Eugene O’Neill Marriage and Family
Eugne O’Neill married three women, two of whom he divorced, and had three children. His eldest son Eugene, from his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, committed suicide at age 40, and his second son, by his second wife, Agnes Boulton, was emotionally unstable. He disowned his daughter Oona, also by Agnes Boulton, when she married Charlie Chaplin, who was O’Neill’s age.
Eugene O’Neill died in 1953, spending his final years unable to work, living in a Boston Hotel and refusing to see anyone except his doctor, a nurse and his third wife, Carlotta Montgomery. Through his writing, the American theater developed into a cultural medium that continues today.
Bibliography:
Stephen A. Black. Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Steven F. Bloom. Student Companion to Eugene. O'Neill. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.
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