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Eugene O'Neill was America's first major playwright and the
first to fully explore serious themes as subject matter for
the theater. He hailed from a stage family that followed his
actor-father each year on the tour circuit. O'Neill began
to write seriously when living in Greenwich Village in New
York City and working with the Provincetown Players. His early
plays were notable for their crude and colloquial dialogue,
a far cry from the expected eloquence of the comedy of manners.
Experimenting further with stark realism, O'Neill wrote several
plays in which he traced a character's emotional decline into
a primitive self. O'Neill never enjoyed perfect health: he
struggled with alcoholism, nearly died of tuberculosis as
a young adult, and in the 1930s began to suffer from Parkinson's
disease. His output, however, was remarkable, with such works
as The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape
(1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Mourning
Becomes Electra (1931), and The Iceman Cometh
(1946). In addition, he won four Pulitzer Prizes and the 1936
Nobel Prize in literature. O'Neill's strongly autobiographical
Long Day's Journey into Night was first produced
in 1956, three years after his death.
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