Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (1888–1953) was an American playwright. He had a varied profession as seaman, gold prospector, journalist, and actor before associating himself with experimental theatre in 1916. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.
Born in a hotel room in New York’s Broadway district, O’Neill was the son of James O’Neill, a matinee idol and one-time famous Shakespearean actor.
O’Neill won his first Pulitzer Prize for his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon (1920.) Among his other notable plays are the monumental trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and The Iceman Cometh (1946.)
O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) is considered a landmark in modern theater. This semi-autobiographical tragedy portrayed two mutually destructive family relationships and won O’Neill a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
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There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
—Eugene O’Neill
Topics: Future, The Present
Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
—Eugene O’Neill
Topics: Life and Living
The only living life is in the past and future—the present is an interlude—strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.
—Eugene O’Neill
Topics: The Present
When men make gods, there is no God!
—Eugene O’Neill
Topics: God
Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.
—Eugene O’Neill
Topics: Loneliness
What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing, the ugly, and the disgusting; the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember.
—Eugene O’Neill
Topics: Memory