Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O’Neill was the son of a touring actor, a sailor, a derelict and a tuberculosis patient before he became the first American dramatist of world stature and the only one to win the Nobel Prize. Mourning Becomes Electra of 1931 sets the Oresteia in New England after the Civil War, thirteen acts in one evening, with the Mannon family playing the house of Atreus. The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, the play about his own family that he ordered withheld until after his death, are the late masterpieces. He wrote with a tremor and died in a Boston hotel, saying, born in a hotel room and died in one.