America's only four-time Pulitzer playwright was born in a Times Square hotel
Eugene O'Neill came into the world in a hotel room on what is now Times Square, grew up trailing his touring actor father, drifted through years at sea and nearly died in a waterfront boarding house. He turned that wreckage into Long Day's Journey into Night and a Nobel Prize.
O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, at the Barrett House on Longacre Square, now Times Square. His father, James, was an Irish immigrant actor who drank heavily; his mother became addicted to morphine prescribed after Eugene's difficult birth. With his parents often on tour, he was sent to Catholic boarding school at seven. He lasted a single year at Princeton, and one colourful but possibly invented story says he was thrown out for hurling a beer bottle through the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson.
Years as a sailor followed, marked by depression and drinking but also by a lasting love of the sea that runs through many of his plays. He joined the seamen's branch of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Back in New York and broke, he attempted suicide in 1912 at a saloon boarding house that later became the setting of The Iceman Cometh. That same year he divorced and caught tuberculosis, and he came to see his time in a sanatorium as a rebirth: he left determined to be an artist or nothing.
He studied playwriting at Harvard under George Pierce Baker, mixed with Greenwich Village radicals including John Reed, and from 1916 found a home with the Provincetown Players. Beyond the Horizon, the first of his plays to be published, reached Broadway in 1920 and took the Pulitzer; The Emperor Jones became his first major hit that year. He brought European-style realism to American theatre, gave working-class characters vernacular speech and wrote almost nothing but tragedy; Ah, Wilderness! is the rare well-known comedy.
The 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature came with a speech largely devoted to his idol, August Strindberg. After a ten-year gap, The Iceman Cometh reached the stage in 1946. He died on November 27, 1953. Long Day's Journey into Night, which dramatises his family in the days before he entered the sanatorium, won a Tony in 1957, and he remains the only dramatist with four Pulitzers.
Source: Eugene O'Neill
