Eugene O'Neill is America's greatest playwright, the first uni-versally recognized world dramatist America produced. He virtuallyestablished the modern American theatre. It is first due to hisachievements in dramatic creation that American drama has becomea part of American literature, reached a prosperous state and hasbeen valued universally by various countries in the world. EugeneO'Neill made explorations and experiments as a playwright in manyways, and worked with all his might and life. In the history ofAmerican theatre he is second to none of the others. He wrote alltogether nearly fifty plays, attracted enormous attention, and wonnumerous prizes. The Pulitzer Prize was his four times. He wasawarded the Nobel Prize in 1936 for his excellent contributions toliterature.
Nineteenth-century American drama is marked by its relativelack of quality，integrity and national originality when comparedwith other types of American literature. The gulf between dramaand serious literature continued into the twentieth century. and wasbridged effectively in the period of 1915-1940. The rough date forthe beginning of the modern American drama is 1920. the year of the production of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon.
Eugene Glastone O'Neill was born in a hotel room on October16, 1888. His father，James O'Neill. was an actor, who touredwith his own small company giving performances of The Count ofMonte Cristo adapted from Alexandre Dumas' famous romantic nov-el. For a brief time, Eugene also acted in his father's theatrical cont-pany, but he would be more inclined to revolt against the romantictradition than to preserve it. His family was a tragically disturbedone since his mother suffered from drug addiction and his elderbrother was an alcoholic. He had an unstable childhood。touring thecountry with his parents and receiving an irregular education in dif-ferent private boarding schools. He took a year in Princeton Univer-sity from which he was expelled for a student prank. He went tosea and voyaged to South America, where he worked in BuenosAires at a variety of jobs. He spent time totally unemployed in Ar-gentina. Back in America，he was out of work for some time. Hemade friends with the lowest of society and got to know life better.
In 1912 he developed tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatoriumfor six months. He read widely there in the world's dramatic litera-ture and became infatuated with the works of Ibsen and Strindberg.
After he recovered from tuberculosis in 1914，he studied brieflywith the greatest drama teacher in his time: George Pierce Baker ofHarvard. Thus he was determined to write.
His literary career can be divided into three periods: the earlyperiod (1916-1920).the middle period (1920 ^-1934).and thelate period (1934-1947).
In 1916 he joined an avant-garde group of writers and artistswho had established an amateur theatrical company, the Province-town Players. It produced many of his one-act plays during the nextthree years. Bound East for CardJ.，an atmospheric drama of thedeath of a common sailor with relatively little plot but strong char-acters, was produced in 1916 by the company in the dilapidatedWharf Theatre. It was O'Neill's first performed play. This eventmarked the beginning of O'Neill's long and successful dramatic ca-reer and ushered in the modern era of the American theatre.
Beyond the Horizon, the drama of naturalistic study of fate andfrustration, produced in New York in 1920, was the first of hisearly full-length plays. It won him a Pulitzer Prize for the firsttime. It was an important watershed in his career. With it hemoved from little theatres in Greenwich Village to prominent pro-ducers on Broadway. After Boyond the Horizon a series of theatricaltriumphs followed in fairly quick succession.
Anna Christie, first produced under the title Chris Christopher-son in 1920 and revived successfully in 1921，is another naturalisticstudy of tragic frustration. The heroine had been neglected by herfather, a sea captain incapable of resisting the seduction of seafaringlife. She became a prostitute. The captain, unable to understandhis own behavior and overwhelmed by his sense of failure as a fa-ther. speaks of the sea as a demon and equates it with diabolic fate.This play won his second Pulitzer Prize for O'Neill.
In one way or another the characters in these and other earlyworks were entangled with circumstances which were destructive ofhappiness.
Following Anna Christie, O'Neill began a period of restless ex-perimentation and colossal productivity. The Emperor Jones, per-haps the most remarkable of O'Neill's early plays, was also staged in1920. It is the drama of an African American Pullman car porterwho flees the country after killing a man and holds imperial swayover a West Indies island until the natives revolt and murder him.O'Neill presented American audiences with their first black tragichero. It is presented in scenes, rather than in acts. The scenes shiftrapidly, almost like dream sequence, and some are fantasy mo-ments, meant to parallel the feverish anxiety ofutus Jones as hetries to flee from his rebellious people through the jungle. The playis a study of power and politics,just as much as it is a study in racialawareness. It marks a turning point in O'Neill's career and estab-lished him as America's most promising playwright. It was the firstAmerican play to adapt expressionistic techniques. O'Neill effective-ly uses the scenic design of the play (sets, lights, and sound) tobring the audience into Jones' psyche. It is more than an imitationof Eruopean plays.
The Emperor Jones was followed by an even more exciting andcertainly more provocative expressionistic drama, The Hairy Ape(1922)，which was more complex in action and symbolization thanThe Emperor Jones.
O'iNeill continued the natualistic approach in All God's ChillunGot Wings(1924) and Desire Under the Elms(1924). All God'sChillu，一Got Wings involves the marriage of a tarnished white girland a devoted Negro lover. Desire Under the Elms is a tragedy ofpassion. It lays particular stress on psychological analysis, and rep-resents aberrant personality. Suffering in this play was produced bystrong passions and conflicts of will on the part of determined char-acters. Eben and his stepmother Abbie, the fateful lovers, aredrawn irresistibly toward each other despite an initial conflict of in-terests. O'Neill contrasted the passions of his youthful characterswith the hardness and lovelessness of a Calvinist view of fife repre-sented by the old farmer Ephraim Cabot. Eben, who betrays histyrannical father Cabot, is engaged in Oedipal conflict with him;and the young stepmother Abbie, who married Ephraim becauseshe sought security and coveted his farm, becomes tragically in-volved with her stepson when her suppressed hunger for love turnsinto reckless passion. Over the developing destiny of the fatefullovers brood the elm trees, symbolic of natural fertility and mysteryof a flourishing New England farm. This play is a naturalistic treat-ment of a classic theme in which the Theseus is a lusty elderlyfarmer, the Hippolytus a mother-fixated son and jealous stepson,and the Phaedra a farmer household drudge with an ambition to se-cure her future as the inheritor of a thriving farm. Desire Under theElms possesses the strength of classic tragedy. It reflects the wind-swept landscape of the human soul. In any case, nothing compara-ble to this work in power derived from a sense of tragic characterand situation that had been achieved by the American theatre in thehundred and fifty years of its history.
