In 1912, a twenty-four-year-old man who had already failed at marriage, at sea voyaging, at gold prospecting, and at most things he had attempted, checked himself into a tuberculosis sanatorium in Connecticut and spent six months reading Strindberg and Nietzsche and deciding that he was going to be a playwright.
His father was James O’Neill, one of the most famous actors in America, Irish-born, self-made, famous for a role in The Count of Monte Cristo that he had played so many thousands of times it had consumed him. His mother was Mary Ellen Quinlan, the daughter of Irish immigrants, a woman who had become addicted to morphine after the difficult birth of Eugene and who spent the rest of her life in a dependence she could neither escape nor fully acknowledge.
Eugene O’Neill wrote about his family for the rest of his life. Long Day’s Journey into Night, the play that is widely considered the greatest American drama of the twentieth century, is a portrait of one day in the life of a family that could only be the O’Neills — the famous father, the morphine-dependent mother, the two sons trapped in the house with them, unable to leave, unable to stay.
He died in 1953, in a Boston hotel room, the same way he had lived — with a ferocity of feeling that he could neither contain nor entirely express.
He won four Pulitzer Prizes. His father, whose frugality had made Eugene’s childhood a form of deprivation, had left him a modest estate.
The Irish do not have a simple relationship with what their fathers left them. O’Neill turned that complicated relationship into art.
