Eugene O'Neill

It is a given among the Irish that "If the true history of the world were ever told - and it never will be - it would be told through myths and legends." Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, born in 1888 and dying sixty-five years later in 1953 - considered the "pre-eminent" American dramatist - was, in his heart and always, a product of his Celtic ancestry. From his first published-but-unproduced volume of one-acts, "Thirst" and Other Plays (1914), to his deliberately posthumous-produced masterworks Long Day's Journey Into Night and "Hughie," O'Neill exhibited an attitude toward storytelling that always gave first priority to the balance of mythic "truth" and realistic reproduction.

He came by his Celtic preoccupations honestly: Eugene O'Neill was born into an almost-classic example of the Irish-American first-generation immigrant household - complete with internal divisions of Art versus Domesticity and Upper v. Lower Class conflicts to dominate his development of a worldview. His father, James O'Neill, had been a poor "Shanty Irish" immigrant who, though risen to prominence by virtue of his acting talent in the turn-of-the-century American theater, always maintained a miserly attitude toward his possessions. His mother, Ellen Quinlan O'Neill, was of "Lace Curtain" Irish stock, a woman who once considered a vocation as a nun, instead marrying beneath her station the attractive theater artist in a moment of romantic whimsy. Eugene, their third child, was almost literally "born i

lk up Broadway forty blocks and obtain a job from his father in (yet another) travelling tour of Monte Cristo. The next year he would use James O'Neill's connections to work as a newswriter, still later having his father pay for a six month sanitorium stay (for tuberculosis), then publish his unproduced plays in 1914, then support the 26 year-old for a year's study of drama at Harvard University. The experiences were very real, but at all times the unique brand of O'Neill Family bonding/self-destruction were to cocoon the writer in his times of greatest need. Still, it was talent that allowed Eugene O'Neill to establish himself in the theater on his own merits. Returning to New York City from the Harvard experience in 1915, the younger O'Neill abandoned his father's commercial theater patronage to immerse himself in the nascent "little theater" movement. It was a tumultuous, exciting time for the American theater: with no particular national/cultural agenda of its own established as theater tradition, the little theater movement threw open its doors to Ibsenite Realism, Zola-type Naturalism, German Expressionism - influences that found a ready place in the heart of the young playwright who had a wealth of experiences to reco