Educated at Betts Academy in Connecticut and a short time at Princeton (from which he was suspended), O'Neill travelled widely and held a variety of jobs including sailor, stage manager, actor, gold prospector and reporter. In 1912, he spent six months in a sanatorium for tuberculosis. While in hospital, he read many of the greatest dramatists including Strindberg and Ibsen and this influenced him to begin writing plays and poetry. In 1916, he produced his first play, Bound East for Cardiff with the Provincetown Players group. His association with the group blossomed over the next 4 years and many of his one-act plays were produced by them. By 1920, his production had moved to Broadway and his fame as a playwright was firmly established. O'Neill won the Pulitzer Prize on four occasions, however, his greatest literary achievement was the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. It was also at this time that his career began to decline. Nevertheless, most of O'neill's finest work was produced between 1935 and his death in 1953 and included The Iceman Cometh (1939) and his masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941). His other well-known works include Beyond the Horizon (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), Anna Christie (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1925), Strange Interlude (1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Ah, Wilderness (1933) and Hughie (1942). |
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