Eugene O'Neill's Life at a Glance
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, born in 1888, stands as one of America's greatest playwrights, whose works revolutionized the American theater landscape.
His life was marked by personal struggles, profound insights, and groundbreaking achievements that earned him multiple Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize in Literature. This timeline chronicles the key events in O'Neill's life, from his early years and turbulent family dynamics to his prolific career and lasting legacy in dramatic literature. Through this journey, we glimpse the complexities of a man who transformed his personal experiences into powerful narratives that continue to resonate with audiences today.
1877
- June: James O'Neill, an established stage actor, marries Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan in New York. Later in the year, Nettie Walsh files a suit against James for divorce, claiming they had been married in August 1871 and had a son together.
1883
- February 12: James O'Neill debuts as the lead actor in The Count of Monte Cristo. Due to the play's commercial success, he will give more than 6,000 performances over three decades, defining his career.
1885
- March 4: Edmund O'Neill, the 1-1/2-year-old child of James and Ella O'Neill, dies of the measles. Ella blames her older son, Jamie, for the death, believing he intentionally exposed his brother to the disease.
1888
- October 16: Eugene Gladstone O'Neill is born in a Broadway hotel room in what will later be known as New York's Times Square. Ella O'Neill takes morphine to ease the pain of delivery, beginning a long-term addiction to the drug.
- October 18: Two days after his son's birth, James O'Neill resumes his tour in The Count of Monte Cristo. As an infant, Eugene joins his father on tour, spending much of his early years traveling.
1895
- September: Eugene O'Neill enters the strict Catholic boarding school St. Aloysius Academy for Boys. He will leave the Catholic Church as a teenager and never return.
1906
- September 20: O'Neill enrolls at Princeton University.
1907
- June: After a brief college career marked by drinking and womanizing, O'Neill is expelled "for poor scholastic standing." He moves to New York, continuing his drinking and carousing with his brother Jamie.
1909
- October 2: O'Neill marries Kathleen Jenkins in a secret ceremony at Hoboken Trinity Church. Soon after, he sets sail for Honduras on one of several long sea voyages he will take in the coming years. Kathleen gives birth to a son, Eugene O'Neill Jr., before the couple divorces in 1912.
1912
- Drinking heavily and living at Jimmy-the-Priest's boarding house and saloon in New York, O'Neill attempts suicide. In 1919, he writes Exorcism, a one-act play based on the suicide attempt.
- O'Neill contracts tuberculosis and is inspired to become a playwright while reading during his recovery.
1914
- Fall: O'Neill attends a course in dramatic technique at Harvard University, taught by George Pierce Baker, but leaves after one year.
1916
- O'Neill joins a group of young writers and painters who launch an experimental theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They produce his first one-act play, Bound East for Cardiff, one of many plays he writes about sailors or life at sea. The play debuts in New York on November 3.
1918
- April 12: O'Neill marries writer Agnes Boulton. They will have two children, Shane and Oona, before O'Neill leaves Agnes for Carlotta Monterey, who becomes his third wife.
1920
- February 3: O'Neill's first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, is produced on Broadway at the Morosco Theater. The play wins a Pulitzer Prize, the first of three in O'Neill's lifetime.
- August 10: James O'Neill dies in New London, Connecticut, after confiding to Eugene that The Count of Monte Cristo cursed his career as an actor.
- December 27: O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, which follows the destruction of an ex-Pullman porter who has seized control of a West Indian island, opens on Broadway. It features Charles Gilpin, the first African American to play a major role in a white American company.
1922
- February 28: Ella O'Neill dies in California of a brain tumor. With his parents now deceased, O'Neill begins to write about them through the characters in his plays.
- May 21: Anna Christie, a play about a prostitute returning to her seafaring father and falling in love with a sailor, is awarded a Pulitzer Prize, O'Neill's second.
1923
- November: An alcoholic and broken man, Eugene's older brother Jamie O'Neill dies after being taken to a sanitarium in an advanced state of delirium tremens. Eugene bases his play A Moon for the Misbegotten, written two decades later, on the last days of his brother's life.
1924
- November 11: Desire Under the Elms, about a woman who cements her bond to her stepson-lover by murdering their baby, premieres at the Greenwich Village Theater. The play is called "the first important tragedy to be written in America."
1928
- O'Neill wins his third Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interlude, a play in nine acts that catalogs the life of a woman, from the death of her fiancé to her listless marriage. The play earns him $275,000 and is later made into a movie starring Norma Shearer.
1929
- July 22: O'Neill marries Carlotta Monterey. She remains his wife and protector until his death 24 years later.
1931
- O'Neill completes one of his most ambitious works, Mourning Becomes Electra, for which he adapts the Greek tragic myth Oresteia to 19th-century New England.
1933
- October 2: Ah, Wilderness!, the only comedy O'Neill writes, opens at the Guild Theatre on Broadway.
1936
- November 12: O'Neill is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first — and only — American dramatist to win the honor.
1939
- O'Neill writes The Iceman Cometh, one of his most acclaimed tragedies. Set in a dive bar in New York, the play concerns the "pipe dreams" of a group of drunken derelicts.
1941
- O'Neill completes Long Day's Journey Into Night, his best-known play, and arguably America's greatest, which dramatizes the embattled relationship of his parents during a wrenching day in the life of his family.
1943
- June 16: O'Neill's daughter Oona, at 18, marries film star Charlie Chaplin, who at 54 is about the same age as her father. Eugene O'Neill rejects the marriage and will never see his daughter again. Oona and Chaplin will have eight children together and remain married until his death in 1977.
1945
- November 29: Delivering the text of Long Day's Journey Into Night to Random House in New York, O'Neill insists that the play must not be published until 25 years after his death.
1946
- October 9: The Iceman Cometh opens on Broadway. It is the last Broadway production of an O'Neill play during his lifetime.
1948
- August: Shane O'Neill is arrested and pleads guilty to heroin possession, receiving a two-year suspended sentence. Eugene O'Neill never again has contact with his younger son.
1950
- September: Eugene O'Neill Jr. commits suicide. His note reads: "Never let it be said of O'Neill that he failed to finish a bottle." His father, in failing health, does not attend the funeral of his oldest child.
1953
- November 27: Suffering from a neuromuscular disorder that has robbed him of the ability to write, O'Neill dies in the Shelton Hotel in Boston. He has written 50 plays and seen 35 of them produced.
1956
- February: Yale University Press publishes Long Day's Journey Into Night. Carlotta takes the manuscript to Yale after Random House adheres to O'Neill's instruction not to publish the play until 25 years after his death.
- November 7: Long Day's Journey Into Night opens at the Helen Hayes Theatre in New York. The playwright is recognized with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
1957
- May 2: A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill's play about his brother's final days, debuts at the Bijou Theater in New York.
1967
- More Stately Mansions, an unfinished manuscript O'Neill thought he had destroyed, is finished by others and produced on Broadway as — misleadingly — "a new play by Eugene O'Neill." Although it stars Ingrid Bergman, it is not a hit.
1976
- October 19: President Gerald Ford signs a bill into law authorizing the establishment of the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site at Tao House in Danville, California. O'Neill wrote his masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten while living at the site from 1937 to 1944.
1979
- December 29: The Eugene O'Neill Society, a scholarly and professional organization devoted to the promotion and study of the playwright's life and works, is formed.
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