Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953)

Eugene O'Neill grew up in a theatre trunk. His father was a famous actor who toured the country in the same play for thirty years, playing the same romantic hero to the same appreciative crowds, and O'Neill spent his childhood watching a man perform a lie about himself with perfect professional conviction. He spent his adult life writing plays that could not be performed in one evening and could not be looked away from.

Long Day's Journey into Night takes place in a single day, in a single house, in a family that has been destroying itself for so long that the destruction has become its form of love. The Tyrones drink and blame and forgive and blame again. The irony is not dramatic. It is structural: the very mechanisms by which these people try to hold each other together are the mechanisms by which they come apart.

O'Neill brought a European seriousness to the American stage — Ibsen's moral rigour, Strindberg's psychological violence — and applied it to a country that preferred its theatre cheerful. He received the Nobel Prize in 1936. He did not attend the ceremony. He was ill, or said he was.

He gave no Nobel Lecture and was not at the banquet; an American diplomat read his words (1936). In them he paid his debt to a Swede: August Strindberg, "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists". Read it at NobelPrize.org.