O'Neill, Son and Artist

Louis Sheaffer's second volume follows Eugene O'Neill from the point his first volume, Son and Playwright, left off, an aspiring dramatist newly recovered from tuberculosis and determined, after a suicide attempt in a New York boarding house in 1912, to make a life out of writing rather than the sea, journalism, or the acting career his father James O'Neill had built. This volume follows O'Neill through his years with the Provincetown Players, where Bound East for Cardiff premiered on a wharf in 1916, and through the run of major plays that made him, uniquely among American dramatists, a four time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Beyond the Horizon in 1920, Anna Christie in 1922, Strange Interlude in 1928, and, published only after his death, Long Day's Journey Into Night. It follows the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, which ill health kept O'Neill from collecting in person; his acceptance speech was read at the Stockholm banquet by the American charge d'affaires, and it credited the influence of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg above all.

Sheaffer gives real attention to the wreckage O'Neill left in his personal life across these same decades, three marriages, the second to the writer Agnes Boulton, with whom he had two children, Shane and Oona, before divorcing her for the actress Carlotta Monterey in 1929, and the 1943 estrangement from Oona after she married Charlie Chaplin, a rift O'Neill never repaired, dying without ever meeting the eight grandchildren that marriage eventually gave him. The volume follows the severe tremor that overtook O'Neill in his last decade, a condition that made writing physically impossible and left an ambitious eleven play cycle on American history almost entirely unfinished, while he instead completed the three intensely autobiographical late plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, on which his final reputation now largely rests. It closes with his 1953 death in a Boston hotel room, the same kind of room, as O'Neill himself is said to have observed near the end, in which he had been born.

Sheaffer builds the volume from decades of his own interviews with people who had known O'Neill, research that gives the account of his later, more withdrawn years an intimacy few earlier biographies had managed.