1. Brief Introduction to Eugene O’Neill University of Central Florida Yongjie (Tim) Liu

2. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote only one well-known comedy (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

3. Early life O'Neill was born into the theatre. His father, James O'Neill, was a successful touring actor in the last quarter of the 19th century whose most famous role was that of the Count of Monte Cristo in a stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas père novel. His mother, Ella, accompanied her husband back and forth across the country, settling down only briefly for the birth of her first son, James, Jr., and of Eugene.

4. Entry into theatre O'Neill's first efforts were awkward melodramas, but they were about people and subjects--prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors, God's injustice to man A theatre critic persuaded his father to send him to Harvard to study with George Pierce Baker in his famous playwriting course.

5. Eugene, who was born in a hotel, spent his early childhood in hotel rooms, on trains, and backstage. Although he later deplored the nightmare insecurity of his early years and blamed his father for the difficult, rough-and- tumble life the family led--a life that resulted in his mother's drug addiction--Eugene had the theatre in his blood. He was also, as a child, steeped in the peasant Irish Catholicism of his father and the more genteel, mystical piety of his mother, two influences, often in dramatic conflict, which account for the high sense of drama and the struggle with God and religion that distinguish O'Neill's plays.

6. O'Neill's first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916, in the quiet fishing village of Provincetown, Mass., where a group of young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre. In their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act sea play Bound East for Cardiff.

7. His first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920, at the Morosco Theater Beyond the Horizon impressed the critics with its tragic realism, won for O'Neill the first of four Pulitzer prizes in drama--others were for Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Day's Journey into Night--and brought him to the attention of a wider theatre public.

8. Period of the major works the early period (1913~1920) the middle period (1920~1931) the late period (1932~1943)

9. The early period His early period produced many one-act plays. Marriage, family life and his years of life at sea are common themes in his early period. Comparatively, his early plays are not mature in artistic creation, simple in creative style and narrow in subject.

10. The major works his own experiences, especially as a seaman:Thirst, Fog, Warnings, Bound East for Cardiff, Ile, In the Zones, The Rope, The Moon of the Caribbees marriage and family life: A Wife for a Life ， Servitude, Abortion ， Web, The Straw

11. The middle period Eugene O’Neill stepped into a new creative stage. In this period, he was influenced by the major European dramatists and thinkers, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

12. Experimental He hoped to create a “modern psychological approximation of the Greek sense of fate” “I’m always acutely aware of the Force Behind – (Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one call it – Mystery certainly)

13. The major works Beyond the Horizon(1918)(wins Pulitzer Prize) Anna Christie (1920)(wins second Pulitzer Prize) The Emperor Jones (1920) The Hairy Ape ( 1921) All God’s Children Got Wings( 1923) Desire Under the Elms (1924) Strange Interlude (1927)(wins third Pulitzer Prize) Mourning Becomes Electra(1931) Days Without End( 1933), etc.

14. The late period O'Neill's late period returned to realism and dealt with pessimistic theme of people living in a world of highly developed material but poor spirit. His major late plays are: The Iceman Cometh( 1939), Long Days’ Journey Into Night( 1940) (wins fourth Pulitzer Prize in 1956), Hughie (1941), A Moon For the Misbegotten( 1943), A Touch of the Poet( 1942)

15. Death O'Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65. As he was dying, he, in a barely audible whisper, spoke his last words: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and God damn it, died in a hotel room."