Biography Of Eugene O'Neill

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BIOGRAPHY OF EUGENE O’ NEILL

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in a New York City hotel room on 16th October, 1888,he son of famous actor James O’Neill and Ella O’Neill, spent the first seven years of his life touring with his father’s theater company. These years introduced O’Neill to the world of theater and the difficulties of maintaining artistic integrity. His father, once a well-known Shakespearean, had taken a role in a lesser play for its sizable salary. Family life was unstable. O'Neill's mother frequently accompanied her husband on tour and, although they had a long-standing summer home, Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut, the family was constantly on the move.

O’Neill spent the next seven years of his life receiving a strict Catholic education before attending a private secular school in Connecticut. . The greater instability came from James O'Neill's heavy drinking and Ella's addiction to morphine. This was discovered to O’Neill only at the age of 13. His brother Jamie, ten years his senior, was brilliant but erratic. Sexually perverted, drinking heavily, employed only spasmodically as an actor and constantly dependent on his father, he was a glamorous and influential figure for O’Neill’s. Though a bright student life, he was already caught up in a world of alcohol and prostitutes by the time he entered college. He eventually dropped out before finishing his first year at Princeton University. Though he would later enroll in a short class in playwriting at Harvard, this was the end of his formal education. After leaving Princeton University, between1909-12 he worked in an odd assortment of jobs and traveled extensively as a sailor. Exposure to working class people made a deep impression on O'Neill’s m...

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... (1956),

• A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957)

In short, Eugene O’Neill is one of the greatest play writers in American history. Through his experimental and emotional dramas he addresses the difficulties of human society with deep psychological complexities.

Bibliography:

• COMPLETE WORKS, 1924 (2 volumes)

• THE FOUNTAIN, 1922 (written, published in. 1926)

• HAIRY APE, 1921 (written, published 1923)

• NINE PLAYS, 1932

• LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, 1941 (written, published. 1955)

• PLAYS, 1941 (3 vols., revived. edited. 1955)

• EUGENE O'NEILL AT WORK, 1981

• THE LONG VOYAGE HOME, 1917

• ABORTION, 1913-1914 (written, published. 1958)

• 'LLE, 1916 (written, published. 1919)

• THE ROPE, 1918 (written, published. 1919)

• THE ICEMAN COMETH, 1939 (written, published. 1946)

• SELECTED LETTERS, 1988 (edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer)

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