Eugene O'Neill- "Pre-eminent" American Dramatist"

During the difficult pregnancy, O'Neill's mother, ever-ready to let her dissatisfaction with the underway status quo be known, developed a morphine dependance resulting from over-medication prescribed by a quack doctor that mark father James' pinchpenny idea of what medical bills should cost. It was a turbulent childhood: periods of prosperity alternating with lean seasons, meeting the literati and the road-weary with al virtually live regularity, having both parents attempt to instill their particular Irish prospect on brio in the O'Neill siblings. Growing up in this rootless, conflict-laden household - bound together, nevertheless, by bouts of intense emotional get by among family members - Eugene O'Neill's childhood was a microcosm of the social issues that would emerge in the proterozoic 20th Century.

It was also an Irish Catholic upbringing. "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," so the saying goes. At the most basic level, O'Neill never deviated from the essential dramaturgy of the Roman Catholic liturgy, noning himself: "In all my plays sin is punished and redemption takes place." thither was a much deeper resonance of Catholicism runway by means of his acidulate than that simplification, however. Indicative of the Gaelic individualism and mysticism running through the I

This resolve have with 2 other factors to slow O'Neill's ensuing writing efforts intimately: an ambition to take on even-greater scaled themes, and the onslaught of shaking palsy Disease. While his notebooks are filled with plans for continued experimentation, the actual plays pen to accepted completion (he was known to burn finished manuscripts that did not meet his own exacting standards) have been generally characterized by critics as a return to the more "naturalistic" discomfort his early works. Those criticisms, generally full of acclaim, usually disregard the more subtle, mature working of symbol and mysticism, Catholic and Celtic, interwoven into the apparently realistic structure of O'Neill's later plays.

A brief enquiry of his last full-length work, A Moon For The Misbegotten, will pronto reveal that the playwright had not abandoned his mythic inclinations.

A Moon For The Misbegotten is one of the threesome "autobiographic family" plays O'Neill wrote from 1940-43, two of which were deliberately withheld from production until after his death: the full-length pertinacious Day's Journey Into Night and "Hughie," a one-act piece. Much of O'Neill's prior work contains lesser or greater degrees of autobiographical element, but these three plays are generally conceded to be specifically about the O'Neill (aka "Tyrone") family sprightliness and psyche. Long Day's Journey Into Night garnered O'Neill's fourth Pulitzer Prize for its 1956 prime(a) production three years after his death - and twenty-two years earlier than he had directed his widow, Carlotta, to allow its show; "Hughie," first presented in 1958, has been called "America's greatest one-act play."

For O'Neill is a mystic. ... In him the Celtic nature, with its intimate relations with the past, catches a gleam now and thusly of the dim regions where God brought into being a nobler form of life than had existed before.

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