The Dreamy Kid: Childhood and Adolescence

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953), America’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, was born in a Broadway hotel room in Longacre Square (now Times Square), in the Barrett Hotel, to an Irish immigrant father and a mother of Irish descent. His father James O’Neill was a popular actor and his mother Mary Ellen Quinlan O’Neill accompanied him on frequent tours with a theater company, so Eugene was sent to a Catholic boarding school, where he discovered a love of reading. However, he began to struggle with alcohol abuse at an early age, flunked out of Princeton after one semester, and spent the next five years aimless in New York City and wandering by sea to Guatemala, England and Buenos Aires. At the end of 1911 he attempted suicide following a divorce from a wife he hardly knew with a son he had only seen once. 

O’Neill decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays after his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis. O'Neill had previously written poetry and been employed as a reporter by the New London Telegraph, but found his calling in writing for the theatre. He was inspired not by the popular entertainment his father was immersed in but by the poetic realism of Ibsen, Shaw and others, and his own life experiences in barrooms, merchant ships and the Sanatorium where he had convalesced.