Eugene O'Neill was the playwright who almost single-handedly brought seriousness, depth, and tragic power to the American theater, and the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in a New York City hotel room, the son of a famous touring actor, he grew up amid the rootlessness of theatrical life and a family scarred by his mother's morphine addiction and his brother's alcoholism.
After restless years as a sailor, a prospector, and a drifter, a bout of tuberculosis turned him toward writing. Rejecting the shallow melodrama that then ruled the American stage, O'Neill drew on Greek tragedy, the new psychology of Freud, and his own anguished family to create works of raw emotional force. His many plays — among them The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, Desire Under the Elms, and the monumental trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra — won four Pulitzer Prizes and established American drama as a serious art form.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936, the first American playwright so honored.
His finest works came at the end of his life and reached the stage only after his death. The autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night, a searing portrait of his own family written, he said, "in tears and blood," is widely regarded as the greatest American play. Afflicted in his final years by a crippling tremor that ended his writing, O'Neill died in a Boston hotel in 1953.