Eugene O’Neill, the famous Irish-American playwright and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is known for his dramatic and realistic plays.  From the very start to the very end, Eugene O’Neill’s life was full of tragedy both in real life and on paper.  Many of his plays, in fact, mirror the people and hardships of his tormented life.

O’Neill was born in a hotel room in what is now New York City’s Times Square in 1888 to James O’Neill (who immigrated to the US from Ireland at the age of nine) and Ella Quinlan O’Neill (born in Cleveland, Ohio to Irish immigrant parents).

O’Neill’s father was a touring actor and he spent his early childhood on the road immersed in his parents’ rocky marriage and his mother’s drug addiction.  He later attended a strict Catholic boarding school and also briefly attended Princeton University. Surprisingly, he had a poor academic record here which eventually lead to him being suspended. Also, his heavy drinking, a problem that plagued him throughout his life, didn’t help the cause.  He never returned to Princeton.

In 1909 O’Neill married his first of three wives, Kathleen Jenkins, with whom he had a son, Eugene Jr.  By 1912, he suffered severely from alcoholism and depression and attempted to end his own life.  If that wasn’t enough, he then contracted TB.  Following his rehabilitation from the disease, O’Neill decided to devote his life entirely to writing. Two years later, he attended a theater course at Harvard University and then joined an experimental theater group in Massachusetts.  It was with this group that his writing began to see some success with the group staging many of his plays.  Four years later, O’Neill moved onto his second wife, Agnes Boulton, whom he had two children with, Shane and Oona.  (Agnes and Oona pictured above with O’Neill.)

The early 1920s provided O’Neill with some extreme highs and lows.  His first full length play Beyond the Horizon premiered on Broadway in 1920 which subsequently won him a Pulitzer Prize.  Then there was his personal life: O’Neill’s father passed away that year and then two years later his mother died of a brain tumor. What’s more during this period his brother, an alcoholic, passed away in his early 40s.

In 1936 O’Neill married for the third and final time to a woman named Carlotta Monterey.  Professionally O’Neill’s career was flourishing.  In 1936, he won the Noble Prize in Literature.  To date, he is the first and only American to ever win this esteemed prize.

Unbelievably, the series of family tragedies continued.  O’Neill had only distant relationships with all three of his children and eventually lost them all in tragic ways.  His two sons committed suicide due to substance abuse issues and O’Neill also disowned his daughter, Oona, for marrying the actor/director Charlie Chaplin.  She was 18 and Charlie was in his 50s when they wed. Father and daughter did not reconcile and never spoke to each other again.

Towards the end of his life, O’Neill developed a debilitating neuro muscular disease.  It became extremely difficult for him to write yet he was still able to produce one his life’s greatest works, The Iceman Cometh.  By 1953, O’Neill’s health had deteriorated and he died in a hotel room in Boston with Carlotta, his third wife, by his side.  His play Long Day’s Journey Into Night which he had requested to be published 25 years after his death was actually published early by his wife in 1956.  That same year the play opened on Broadway and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

His last words were, “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and Goddammit, died in a hotel room.”

Source; Source; Image Source 1; Image Source 2

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