Literature · Playwrights
1888–1953 · American
American tragedy — naturalism and expressionism
Eugene O'Neill dragged American theatre away from melodrama and into tragedy. The son of a touring actor, he began with one-act sea plays for the Provincetown Players and went on to write vast, autobiographical dramas of addiction, illusion and family destruction. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and, in 1936, the Nobel Prize in Literature — still the only American playwright to have received it.
A single August day in 1912 in a Connecticut summer house: a miserly actor father, a mother returning to morphine, and two ruined sons (1956)
Long Day's Journey into Night — written in 1941, sealed for 25 years, staged in Stockholm in 1956; a posthumous Pulitzer.
Down-and-outs in a New York saloon nurse their pipe dreams until a travelling salesman arrives to strip them away (1946)
The Iceman Cometh — set in Harry Hope's bar; the salesman is Hickey.
The house of a New England family after the Civil War replays the homecoming, murder and revenge of a Greek warlord's dynasty (1931)
Mourning Becomes Electra — a trilogy transposing the Oresteia to Puritan Massachusetts.
A former Pullman porter turned dictator of a Caribbean island flees through the forest to the quickening beat of a tom-tom (1920)
The Emperor Jones — expressionist, and a landmark role for the black actors Charles Gilpin and Paul Robeson.
A ship's stoker, called a filthy beast by a rich girl, goes looking for where he belongs and finds a gorilla's cage (1922)
The Hairy Ape — expressionism applied to class and industrial labour.
A Swedish sailor's daughter with a past arrives at her father's coal barge in New York harbour (1921)
Anna Christie — his second Pulitzer; filmed in 1930 as Garbo's first talkie.
His only comedy: a nostalgic Fourth of July in a small Connecticut town in 1906, with the family he wished he had had (1933)
Ah, Wilderness! — the sunlit mirror image of his own family.
A farmer's son gives up the sea for a woman and the land, his brother sails in his place, and both are ruined; it won the first of his Pulitzers (1920)
Beyond the Horizon — his first full-length play on Broadway.