In fact, he referred to Broadway as a “show shop,” a place where he felt it was easy to find such entertainment. O’Neill disliked popular plays that went for cheap laughs and portrayed shallow emotions. Their plays were highly realistic and inspired O’Neill to write about characters facing impossible odds. During his recovery in a sanitarium, he read the great playwrights August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen.
Many of these experiences would eventually influence his work, especially his early short plays about the sea. He worked on a cattle boat, prospected for gold, and spent a lot of time with artists. He attended college for a short time, then traveled, and took up odd jobs. He felt that his father had wasted his talent by choosing commercial success over artistic excellence-a point that O’Neill addressed later in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The young Eugene spent a lot of time on the road and backstage, learning about theater (and becoming disillusioned with the light, frothy plays that made his father’s career). His father was a famous traveling actor who made his living playing the lead role in the melodramatic play, The Count of Monte Cristo.
The individual life is made significant just by the struggle.” Struggle was a familiar subject to O’Neill.Įugene O’Neill was born in 1888 in a New York City hotel right on Broadway. Eugene O’Neill said that his goal was “to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant feeling from seeing somebody on stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering but perhaps inevitably being conquered.
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