His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U. O'Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society.
They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, ultimately sliding into disillusion and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known Ah, Wilderness! His father suffered from alcoholism; his mother from an addiction to morphine, prescribed to relieve the pains of the difficult birth of Eugene, who was her third son. He also briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford. Accounts vary as to why he left. He may have been dropped for attending too few classes, [ 11 ] been suspended for "conduct code violations", [ 12 ] or "for breaking a window", [ 13 ] or according to a more concrete but possibly apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle into the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson ", the future president of the United States.
O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression, alcoholism and despair. Despite this, he had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World IWW , which was fighting for improved living conditions for the working class using quick 'on the job' direct action.
After his experience in β13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis , he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays the events immediately prior to going to the sanatorium are dramatized in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night.
In the fall of , he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by George Piece Baker , but left after one year. O'Neill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. His involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid Terry Carlin reported that O'Neill arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays", but this was an exaggeration. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished.
