O'NEILL, EUGENE

born Oct. 16, 1888, New York, N.Y., U.S. died Nov. 27, 1953, Boston, Mass. Eugene ONeill, 1938. in full Eugene Gladstone O'Neill foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946). Additional reading Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill, enlarged ed. (1973, reissued 1987); Doris Alexander, The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (1962); and Louis Shaeffer, O'Neill, Son and Playwright (1968, reprinted 1989), and O'Neill, Son and Artist (1973, reprinted 1990), are biographies. Critical studies of his works include Virginia Floyd (ed.), Eugene O'Neill: A World View (1980), and The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment (1985); Frederic I. Carpenter, Eugene O'Neill, rev. ed. (1979); Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, rev. ed. (1988); and Richard F. Moorton, Jr. (ed.), Eugene O'Neill's Century: Centennial Views on America's Foremost Tragic Dramatist (1991). Major Works: One-act plays of the sea Bound East for Cardiff (performed 1916); The Long Voyage Home (performed 1917), later used as the title of a film version of O'Neill's plays of the sea; Ile (performed 1917); In the Zone (performed 1917); The Moon of the Caribbees (performed 1918), published in a collection, The Moon of the Caribbees, and Six Other Plays of the Sea (1919), which included the first book publication of the above plays plus The Rope (performed 1918), and Where the Cross Is Made (performed 1918). This same collection was published in 1940 as The Long Voyage Home: Seven Plays of the Sea. Longer plays Beyond the Horizon (performed and published 1920); The Emperor Jones (performed 1920, published 1921); Anna Christie (performed 1921, published 1922); The Hairy Ape (1922); All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924); Desire Under the Elms (performed 1924, published 1925); The Great God Brown (1926); Marco Millions (performed 1928, published 1927); Strange Interlude (1928), a two-part play in nine acts; Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy comprising Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted; Ah, Wilderness! (1933), O'Neill's only comedy; The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed and published 1946); A Touch of the Poet (written 193542; performed and published posthumously, 1957), third of a projected cycle of 11 plays to be collectively entitled A Tale of the Possessors, Self-Dispossessed; Long Day's Journey into Night (written 193941; performed and published posthumously, 1956); A Moon for the Misbegotten (written 1943; performed 1957, published 1952); Hughie (written 1941; performed 1964, published 1959, one of a projected cycle of one-act plays, to have been collectively entitled By Way of Orbit); More Stately Mansions (unfinished, written 193541; performed 1962, published 1964).The handiest source for all the plays is The Library of America Complete Plays, 3 vol. (1988). Some of the other plays have been published as separate volumes.