Eugene O'Neill Biography

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was a renowned American playwright. He remained one of the pioneers in introducing poetically titled plays, which were usually used by certain playwrights of Russia, Sweden and Norway. O'Neill’s tragic masterpiece, ‘Long Day's Journey Into Night’, produced after his death in 1956, is not only considered his best work but also listed among greatest American plays of the twentieth century. His long line of remarkable plays includes ‘Beyond the Horizon’, ‘Anna Christie’, ‘The Emperor Jones’, ‘Desire Under the Elms’, ‘Ah, Wilderness!’, and ‘The Iceman Cometh’. A few of his one act plays are ‘A Wife for a Life’, ‘Fog’, ‘Before Breakfast’ and ‘Exorcism’. He was one of the pioneers to use colloquial American speeches in plays. Many of his characters hailed from outskirts of society and strived to keep up their expectations but finally slipped into discontentment due to adversities. A certain degree of hardship, struggle, melancholy and pessimism prevail in most of his plays. The only notable comic play, among the few he had written in the genre, that became famous is ‘Ah, Wilderness!’. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.