Eugene O’Neill was one of those figures in American arts and letters whose principal stock in trade was domestic agony. His best work came from being the youngest son of a respectable but dysfunctional American Irish Catholic family. As a boy, Eugene learned about the theater through his father, one of the most famous actors of his time. The future playwright spent his adolescence as an enthusiastic rakehell, partial to drink, whores, and lowlife companions. These tastes, combined with a deliberate failure to complete his Princeton education, a bout of tuberculosis, and a spell in the merchant navy, seemed to point toward a short, dirty, and deliberately proletarian life.

But O’Neill also had a taste for literature, especially poetry and plays; his early life on tour with his father had added to this an easy familiarity with theatrical techniques. In 1912, after spending six months in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, O’Neill decided to become a playwright. He threw himself into the task, completing thirteen plays in two years. In 1916, he began his long association with the Provincetown Players, which produced many of these one-act plays.

The future playwright spent his adolescence as an enthusiastic rakehell, partial to drink, whores, and lowlife companions.

O’Neill’s was a rather limited literary talent (his prose is often awkward and his poems range from amateurish to crude), but the shows, drawn mostly from his sea voyages and his painful family life, had a vitality and fire that caught the