Nobody agrees in the selection of the "greatest American novelist” or the "greatest American poet,” so far as American literature is concerned, but Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is unquestionably America's greatest playwright. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times and was the only dramatist ever to win a Nobel Prize (1936). He is widely acclaimed "founder of the American drama, and recognized even more as a major figure in world literature.

O'Neill was born in New York on October 16, 1888 into a theatrical family. His father, James O'Neill, had been a well-known Shakespearean actor but ended up as a stereotyped mediocrity--playing his most successful part the Count in The Count of Monte Cristo, over and over again. Eugene grew up in New London, Connecticut, and spent his early years with his parents on theatrical road tours. After a succession of religious boarding schools, he entered Princeton University in 1906 but was suspended a year later after a drunken prank and never resumed his college education. The failure of an early marriage in 1909 when he was only twenty-one drove him to sea and he traveled all over the world. Due to the physical breakdown after a suicide attempt in 1912, he was forced to stay at a sanitarium for several months recovering from tuberculosis, during which time he avidly read up on dramatic literature, and cultivated an interest in play writing. In 1914, he attended Professor George Pierce Baker's drama workshop at Harvard, where his career as a dramatist began. Since then, O'Neill had been wholly dedicated to the mission as a dramatist.

During all his career as a dramatist, O'Neill wrote and published about forty-nine plays altogether of various lengths. He gained some experience by writing some one-act melodramatic plays at first, including Bound East for Cardiff (1916), which describes the dying sailor Yank and his dream about the security and peace which could never exist. O'Neill's first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced in 1920 on Broadway. It made a great hit and won him the first Pulitzer Prize. The theme of Beyond the Horizon is the choice between life and death, the interaction of subjective and objective factors, and this theme is dramatized more explicitly in The Straw (1921) and Anna Christie (1921). Anna Christie is more of a success because it deploys the developing complexity of O'Neill's personal vision, showing us that life is a closed circle of possibilities from which it is impossible to escape.

Between 1920 and 1924 came his prominent achievements in symbolic exssionism:  The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), and Desire Under the Elms (1924). These plays are daring forays into race relations, class conflicts, sexual bondage, social critiques, and American tragedies on the Greek model. What is more, the exssionistic techniques are used in these plays to highlight the theatrical effect of the rupture between the two sides of an inspanidual human being, the private and the public. Built on the success of these exssionistic experimentations, O'Neill reached out to' extend his mastery of the stage and worked up to the summit of his career. He concerned himself with some non-realistic forms to contain his tragic vision in a number of his plays, such as The Great God Brown (1926), which fuses symbolism, poetry, and the affirmation of a pagan idealism to show how materialistic civilization denies the life-giving impulses and destroys the genuine artist, and Lazarus Laughed (1927), which makes full use of the Bible, Greek choruses, Elizabethan tirades, exssionist masks,  populous crowd  scenes,  and  orchestrated laughter. With the winning of the third Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interlude (1928), which brings together a multitude of dramatic concerns, O'Neill consolidated his experience of two decades of playwriting and paved the way to the honor of the Nobel Prize in 1936.

Though O'Neill was on the whole silent during the thirties and some of his works began to suffer from negative criticisms, he kept working hard in isolation at Tap House, his stately mansion in Danville, California, and produced the best and greatest plays of the modern American theater late in his life. The Iceman Cometh (1946) proves to be a masterpiece in the way it is a complex, ironic, deeply moving exploration of human existence, written out of a profound insight into human nature and constructed with tremendous skill and logic. Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956) is equally imssive. The play can be read autobiographically, since some parts of the story are fairly closely based on O'Neill's own family. However, like most great works of literature, the play reaches beyond its immediate subject, dedicated not only to the life of the American family, but also "to the life of Man, to Life itself." As a product of hard-won art, Long Day's Journey Into Night has gained its status as a world classic and simultaneously marks the climax of O'Neill's literary career and the coming of age of American drama.

Of all the plays O'Neill wrote, most of them are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and dicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc. His characters in the plays are described as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, some through love, some through religion, others through revenge, but all meet disappointment and despair. As a playwright, O'Neill himself was constantly wrestling with these issues and struggling with the perplexity about the truth of life. He was searching for an answer both psychologically and artistically, and his dramatic thought followed a tragic pattern running through all his plays, from a celebration and exaltation of "pipe dreams," the romantic dream so to speak, to the doubt about the reality of the dream or the inevitability of the defeat. So his final dramas became "transcendental," in the way that the dramatization of man's effort in finding the secret of life results in a reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.

O'Neill's inventiveness seemingly knew no limits. He was constantly experimenting with new styles and forms for his plays, especially during the twenties when Exssionism was in full swing. Once he used just a single actor, alone on the stage, in his one-act play. In those exssionistic plays, abstract and symbolic stage sets are used to set off against the emotional inner selves and subjective states of mind; lighting and music are employed to convey the changes of mood. AS to his language, O'Neill frequently wrote the lines in dialect, or spelled words in ways which indicate a particular accent or manner of speech. This, sometimes, makes his plays difficult to read, but when they are spoken aloud, the sense becomes clear and the meaning is amplified by the accent.