Playwright

Eugene
O'Neill

Eugene O’Neill remains the only American playwright to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1936). Born in New York City on October 16, 1888, he wrote some fifty plays. His first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon (1920), won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes, the last of which went posthumously to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which was written in 1940 but not published or produced until three years after his death on November 27, 1953. His plays include Anna Christie (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), A Touch of the Poet (written 1938-1942 but first produced 1958), The Iceman Cometh (written 1939 but first produced 1946), Hughie (written 1942 but first produced 1958) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (written 1943 but first produced 1947), which takes up the story of the character Jamie a decade later.