Eugene O'Neill

Born in New York City in 1888, he grew up around the theater while his actor father toured constantly. That unsettled early life, along with years at sea and a serious illness in young adulthood, helped shape the searching, often haunted mood of his writing.

He became the first major American dramatist to give the stage a new kind of realism and emotional intensity. Over the course of his career he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and earned multiple Pulitzer Prizes, with plays such as Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, The Iceman Cometh, and the posthumously produced Long Day's Journey into Night securing his reputation.

His work returned again and again to big themes—family wounds, guilt, addiction, illusion, and the struggle for meaning. Even decades after his death in 1953, his plays remain central to American drama because they are so personal, unsparing, and alive on the page and stage.