Long Day's Journey into Night [antikvár]

Biographical Sketch of Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) 'Some day James O'Neill will best be known as the father of Eugene O'Neill': so Eugene himself frequently boasted throughout 1912. The claim struck those who heard it not with a sense of the young man's prescience but of his presumption. Nothing in his life so far had given any indication that in less than a decade he would be a playwright to reckon with, shaking up the American theatre and shaping a new American drama. Instead, he seemed more likely to become one of the pipe-dreamers who eternally inhabit Harry Hope's no-chance saloon in his own The Iceman Cometh. Born on 16 October 1888, to the respected and accomplished f^ actor James O'Neill and his wife Ella Quinlan O'Neill, Eugene was to find his family an overwhelming force in his life and to ^^ make it the almost constant subject of his plays. He was the O'Neills' third son: the eldest, Jamie, had been born ten years K before; a second son, Edmund, had followed five years later. Life ' was not easy for the O'Neills and their two young children; James was already touring the country in Monte Crista, the vehicle that | would spell both his financial success and his artistic defeat (he | succumbed to popular demand and played the role 4000 times l' between 1883 and 1912). Ella, convent-educated and proper, loved her husband but felt she had married beneath her; she never took to James's theatrical life or to his theatrical friends. | V However, the couple could not bear to be parted, and Ella, with great reluctance, frequently left the children in the care of her | mother to join her husband on the road. Early in 1885, on one of | these occasions, Jamie contracted measles and disobeyed | instructions to stay away from his brother; Edmund became ill and died. Such family history might in another case seem irrelevant, but ^ it is crucial for an understanding of Eugene O'Neill and of his ; work. Ella did not want any more children after Edmund's death, f but James, convinced that it would help solace her, persuaded ^ J, her to have another. The result was a family tragedy that r; blighted all four lives, and not least the new baby, Eugene. In an attempt to counteract the pain of an exceedingly difficult birth, Ella was unwittingly precipitated into the morphine addiction