Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill's first full-length play (Beyond the Horizon) opened on Broadway in 1920, won the Pulitzer Prize (the first of four his plays received), and established him almost literally overnight as the founder of modern American drama. Indeed, O'Neill enjoys a unique double distinction: The playwright who more or less invented modern theater in America is almost universally regarded as its greatest practitioner. His selection as the Nobel laureate in literature in 1936—he was the second American, after Sinclair Lewis, to win the prize—was greeted with widely shared enthusiasm. Remarkably, he wrote several of the plays that are now regarded as his finest after the prize was awarded: A Touch of the Poet (1946), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1952), The Iceman Cometh (1939), and his towering masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (1956). O'Neill's early and formative years were filled with one melodramatic episode after another. His

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