Study Guide to Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

INTRODUCTION TO EUGENE O’NEILL

EARLY LIFE

Eugene O’Neill was born in a Broadway hotel on October 16, 1888. His father was a popular actor of romantic melodrama and Eugene’s first seven years were spent in the larger towns all over the United States. The success of the Count of Monte Cristo, in which his father played the lead, kept the family engaged in almost continuous road tours. From the age of seven to thirteen he attended boarding schools. In 1902 he was sent to Betts Academy at Stamford and the autumn after his graduation he entered Princeton. Although his parents were Catholic, and he had been in and out of parochial schools from an early age, by the time he entered Princeton he had left the Church and never returned to it.

DISCONTENT WITH COLLEGE

In June of 1903 he was dismissed from Princeton, supposedly for throwing a beer bottle through a window of President Wilson’s house. He could have returned the following year, but he had become bored with college and left to become a secretary in a New York mail-order house, the first in a long series of jobs he held before settling down to write.

YEARS OF WANDERING

In 1909 he married Kathleen Jenkins, a union that ended in divorce in 1912. In the same year he went on a gold-prospecting trip to Honduras. He had been reading Jack London, Kipling and Conrad, and we can see in the many journeys of his youth a desire to lead the rugged life of adventure that those writers took as their central theme. In 1910 he shipped on a Norwegian barque for Buenos Aires where he worked at some odds jobs, but ended up, in his own words, a bum on the docks. In 1911, after a trip to Africa on a cattle steamer, he returned to New York where he lived at Jimmy the Priest’s, a waterfront dive which provided the setting for the first act of Anna Christie. After a last voyage to England he found himself on a train to New Orleans following a wild party. His father was playing there in the perennially popular Monte Cristo. He refused to give his son a handout, but did give him a part in the play. At the close of the season the O’Neills returned to their summer home in New London, Connecticut, where Eugene worked as a cub reporter on the Telegraph.

HIS DESIRE TO WRITE

In December of 1912 O’Neill entered a tuberculosis sanatorium. Weakened by years of irregular living, his health had broken down. During his fifteen month convalescence he first felt the urge to write. When he left the sanatorium he was a man with a purpose. To rebuild his health he disciplined himself to a life of exercise and hard work. In the next sixteen months he wrote eleven one-act plays, two long plays, and some poetry. He read omnivorously, in his own words the Greeks and Elizabethans-practically all the classics - and of course all the moderns.

FIRST PLAYS

In the fall of 1914 he went to Harvard to take Professor George Baker’s famous course in playwriting. In the same year his father financed the publication of his first book, Thirst and Other One-act Plays. Several plays in Thirst take men against the sea as their theme. O’Neill’s classic statement of his theme is in the so-called Glencairn group, a sequence of one-act plays dealing with the tramp steamer Glencairn. The group consists of The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home and In the Zone. In these plays man is shown in conflict with nature, which is indifferent to his suffering and inevitable doom. In his early naturalism O’Neill was deeply indebted to Jack London.

FIRST SUCCESS

In 1916 the Provincetown Players put on Bound East for Cardiff. It was O’Neill’s first play to be acted. The Players were a group of Greenwich Village journalists, writers and painters who were interested in rejuvenating the American theater. In 1917-18 he had three plays published in Smart Set, a magazine of protest against the self-satisfied middle class, whose editors, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, were already known as literary critics. The production of Beyond the Horizon in 1920 brought O’Neill his first Pulitzer Prize, and from then until his death no one seriously questioned that he was the leading American playwright of his generation. In 1918 he had married Agnes Boulton Burton, and now, riding the wave of success, he had great faith in the future. However, he resolved he would never sell out to success. His father had felt that the temptation of easy money to be had from a play such as Monte Cristo had ruined his chances of becoming a fine actor. O’Neill resolved he would remain true to his dream and work to express the truth he had in him.

DISILLUSIONMENT

In spite of his remarkable success, O’Neill was convinced that bad fortune was hounding him. Throughout his life, except for brief periods, he had the feeling that man is at the mercy of mysterious forces beyond his control. He began to look back with nostalgia upon his seafaring days, and longed to be on the move again.

FINANCIAL SUCCESS

In the fall of 1920 The Emperor Jones was staged in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Buenos Aires, laying the foundation for O’Neill’s international reputation. One year later Anna Christie opened in New York and brought him his second Pulitzer Prize. In 1922 The Hairy Ape was a success. It dramatized the idea that man has lost his old harmony with nature and is out of place in the modern, technological world. Late in 1922 O’Neill was making $850 a week in royalties. He bought a farm at Ridgefield, Connecticut, and settled down to live in landed elegance as his father had always desired to do.

HIS PESSIMISM

However, O’Neill could not settle down and two years later he was living in Bermuda and working on the idea for Mourning Becomes Electra. His idea of man at the mercy of mysterious forces had broadened through his reading of Freud, a German psychologist (1856-1939), Nietzsche, a German ethical writer who detested Christianity (1844-19000), and Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the romantic period (1788-1860). From Freud he took the idea of man trapped by his unconscious sexual desires. Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy reinforced the naturalistic determinism that had been fostered by his reading of London and Conrad, and his own erratic life. From Nietzsche he took a joyous acceptance of despair as the only sane attitude for a man faced with an indifferent universe.

HONORED FOR HIS WORK

In 1926 he received the degree of Doctor of Literature from Yale University. Although