Eugene Glastone O’Neill

1. Eugene Glastone O’Neill

2. The Period of Modernism • Modern Poetry: experiments in form (Imagism) Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens 2. Prose Writing: Modern realism (lost generation) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner 3. Novels of Social Awareness Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck 4. The Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston 5. The 20th American Drama Eugene O’Neill

3. American Drama • Although the theatre was popular in America from colonial times, and although many Americans wrote plays which were produced, American drama of quality to command respect abroad is the product of the 20th century. It began in rebellion.

4. Stimulated by the naturalistic, symbolic and critical drama of Europe, experimental theatres sprang up in America in the 1910s. In the meantime, American dramatists began to attract attention. Among them, Eugene O’Neill was standing out. • These authors wrote for the new theatre. They not only wanted to avoid the clichés of plot, characterization, dialogue, acting and staging which had stultified the older drama, but their experimentation peculiar to the period was expressionism-the mingling of the realistic and the fantastic or symbolic. Experiments of this kind abound in the work of Eugene O’Neill.

5. Eugene O’Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in New York city on October 16,1888. • Because of his father's profession, O'Neill was sent to a Catholic boarding school where he found his only solace in books. • O'Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65. As he was dying, he, in a barely audible whisper, spoke his last words: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and God damn it, died in a hotel room.“

6. O'Neill was married to Kathleen Jenkins from October 2, 1909 to 1912, during which time they had one son, Eugene Jr. (1910–1950). In 1917, O'Neill met Agnes Boulton, a successful writer of commercial fiction, and they married on April 12, 1918. The years of their marriage—during which the couple had two children, Shane and Oona—are described vividly in her 1958 memoir Part of a Long Story. They divorced in 1929, after O'Neill abandoned Boulton and the children for the actress Carlotta Monterey. • He also had distant relationships with his sons, Eugene, Jr., a Yale classicist who suffered from alcoholism, and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40, and Shane O'Neill, a heroin addict who also committed suicide. • In 1943, O'Neill disowned his daughter Oona for marrying the English actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54.

7. O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936 and Pulitzer prizes for four of his plays: Beyond the Horizon(1920), Anna Christine(1922), Strange Interlude(1928) and long day’s journey into night(1957). O’Neill is credited with raising American theatre from its narrow origins to an art form respected around the world.

8. His plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, engaging in depraved behavior, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote only one well-known comedy (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

9. As a result of his tragic view of life, his works in totality indicate chaos and hopelessness. In the late 1930s, he withdrew into seclusion. During the early 1940s, he suffered from a nervous disease which prevented him from completing his great project. He reemerged with The Iceman Cometh in 1946. He died in 1953. The publication of Long Day’s journey into night in 1956 revived worldwide interest in his work.

10. As America's foremost playwright, O’Neill successfully introduced the European theatrical trends of realism, naturalism and expressionism to the American stage as devices to express his comprehensive interest in his life and humanity. He often ignored normal play division of acts and scenes, paid little attention to the expected length of plays, made his characters wear masks, reintroduced ghosts, chorus, monologue and direct addresses to audience. • He employed setting, sound and light to enhance emotion rather than to represent a real place.

11. O’Neill was no doubt the greatest American dramatist of the first half of the 20th century. He was the first playwright to explore serious themes in the theatre and to carry out his continual, vigorous and courageous experiments with theatrical conventions. His plays have been translated and staged all over the world.

12. Long Day’s journey into night (1956) • The play is set in the summer home of the Tyrone family, August 1912. The four major characters include James Tyrone, the father, a famous actor, anxious to become rich at the expense of his own talent; Mary Tyrone, the mother, a drug addict; James Tyrone, their elder son, and Edmund Tyrone, their younger son.

13. The mother becomes mentally ill because she is extremely unhappy with her married life. Young Jamie loses faith in life, while Edmund the wandered comes back with tuberculosis. All the four suffer frustrations and wish to escape from the harsh reality, James and Jamie looking for solace in their cups, while Mary and Edmund seek the protection of the fog which they hope would screen them from the intrusion of the world outside.

14. All are torn in a war between love and hate, and no one is sure which is the stronger emotion. The long day thus journeys into night when the tragedy of the family is finally enacted. Love gives way to hate, day to night and hope to despair.

15. The play creates a world in which communication has broken down. • The play is all the more tragic because it leaves no hope for the future; the future for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past bound in by alcohol and morphine.

16. Desire under the Elms • place plot elements and themes of Greek tragedy in a rural New England setting.