Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16th, 1888 in New York City. His father was James O’Neill who was a popular actor at the time, and Eugene spent much of his early life traveling on tour with his parents. After years spend studying in Christian schools, Eugene attended Princeton University for one year before being expelled . Following his expulsion from Princeton, Eugene O’Neill spent years jumping from job to job around the world including a journey to Honduras as part of a gold mining operation and as an assistant manager for a theatrical company on tour . O’Neill began writing plays in the fall of 1913 with the one-act play Bound for East Cardiff written in the spring of 1914, which was produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players. Then in 1936, Eugene O’Neill won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and O'Neill also won the Pulitzer Prize four times. After many years of active writing and producing his plays, Eugene O’Neill wrote relatively few plays between 1934 and his death in 1953, but the few plays were important including The Iceman Cometh and the seminal Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was posthumously published and had a strong autobiographical component. Eugene O’Neill died on November 27th, 1953.
Some attributes of Eugene O’Neill that are worth mentioning and exploring include his economic well-being, extensive mourning, struggles with alcohol, as well as a loss of religious faith. The economic well-being of O’Neill can be inferred from his father’s popularity as an actor as well as O’Neill’s attendance at boarding schools that were most likely very costy (Londre 352). O’Neill’s extensive mourning occurred as he lost his entire parental family by 1923 and is reflected in work as his plays become filled with “portraits of his mother, father, and brother” (Black 17). O’Neill supposedly became an alcoholic by the age of fifteen in response to being blamed for his mother’s morphine addiction and battled with it for most of his life as his brother, Jamie, drank himself to death by age 40 (Churchwell).