Eugene O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888. O'Neill was one of the great American playwrights, a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the recipient of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was among the first American playwrights to write casual, vernacular speech, or to focus on the lives of those outside high society. Almost all of his plays are tragic, built around characters who are disillusioned as their dreams of a better life fail to come true.
As a young man, O'Neill spent a few years working as a merchant seaman, and several of his plays are set on ships or feature sailors among their characters. His first dramatic success came with a set of one-act plays, each set among the passengers on the S. S. Glencairn. The Glencairn plays (e-book | print) were first produced by the Provincetown Players, a Massachusetts company that was successful enough to produce its own season in New York for several years. They were adapted for the movies in 1940 as The Long Voyage Home.
O'Neill made his New York debut in 1918 with Beyond the Horizon (e-book | print). The family drama was not an enormous commercial success, running for only a few months, but it was well received by the critics, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1920.
His first big hits also arrived in 1920. The Emperor Jones (e-book | print), in which an African-American man takes power as the absolute ruler of a small Caribbean island, was an oblique commentary on the United States' occupation of Haiti, which was an issue in the presidential campaign that year. The play had a racially integrated cast, which was still a daring thing in 1920, and with the exception of short scenes at the beginning and ending, is almost entirely a monologue for the actor playing the dictator. Jose Limon choreographed a ballet version of the play in 1956, to music by Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Anna Christie (e-book | print), which also premiered in 1920, was even more popular, and won O'Neill his second Pulitzer Prize. It's the story of a former prostitute and her fight to be accepted in mainstream society after she falls in love. The 1930 film adaptation starred Greta Garbo; it was her first talking picture, and the "Garbo Talks!" advertising campaign is remembered almost as well as the movie. The story was adapted, with a far happier ending, for the 1957 musical New Girl in Town.
O'Neill received his third Pulitzer in 1928, for the experimental Strange Interlude (print), a nine-act, five-hour play in which characters deliver long stream-of-consciousness monologues of their inner thoughts to the audience. It was a controversial play—an abortion is central to the plot—and it was banned in many cities.
O'Neill rarely attempted comedy, and his only major success in that form was the 1933 Ah, Wilderness! (print), a sentimental coming-of-age story set in small-town New England. In 1959, it would become the second O'Neill-based musical for composer Bob Merrill, as Take Me Along.
In 1936, O'Neill received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee praised "the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." The Nobel usually comes as something of a lifetime achievement award, at the end of a distinguished career, but O'Neill still had more enduring classics to write.
The Iceman Cometh (e-book | print) was written in 1939, but not performed until 1946; O'Neill didn't think the public would accept it. And it was a bleak tale, even by the standards of O'Neill. A dozen barflies spend their days together in a rundown tavern, boasting of their grand dreams and plans, unable to face the fact that those dreams will never come true. Lee Marvin and Fredric March star in the 1973 film adaptation (streaming | DVD).
O'Neill's masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night (e-book | print), was written in 1941. It is a ferociously harsh autobiographical portrait of O'Neill's own family—alcoholic father and morphine-addicted mother with two sons, parents haunted by memories of the middle son who died in childhood—and O'Neill gave the finished script to his publisher, Random House, with instructions that it should not be published, much less produced, until 25 years after his death. O'Neill died in 1953, and his widow, Carlotta Monterey, soon demanded that the play be published. Random House refused, and Monterey arranged for the play to be published elsewhere.
Long Day's Journey Into Night was first produced, in a Swedish translation, in Stockholm in 1956. (The Swedish theater community had always been great fans of O'Neill's work, even more than American audiences.) The Broadway production came a few months later, and O'Neill was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize, his fourth. The play has been filmed several times, including in 1962 with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson; in 1973 for British television with Laurence Olivier; and in 1987 with Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey.
O'Neill continues to be a major presence in American theater, with one or another of his major plays receiving a major revival every few years. He was an important influence on the generations of playwrights who followed, including Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Arthur and Barbara Gelb are the authors of By Women Possessed (e-book | print), a comprehensive biography.
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October 17, 1931
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October 17, 1938
Evel Knievel was born. Knievel was a stuntman and entertainer who performed elaborate long-distance motorcycle jumps in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974, Knievel attempted to jump across the Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle (officially registered by the state of Idaho as an aircraft). He appeared to clear the far rim of the canyon, but his parachute deployed prematurely and he was blown back into the canyon, landing on the same side of the river as he began. The documentary Being Evel (streaming | DVD) looks at his career and the American fascination with daredevils.
October 16, 1968
Yasunari Kawabata became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels are often tales of illicit romance that seem to end abruptly without coming to a conclusion; Kawabata believed that conclusions were prone to excessive sentiment, and that the story of what happened should be sufficient without a tidy ending. The Nobel committee singled out three of Kawabata's novels in awarding him the prize: Snow Country (e-book | print), Thousand Cranes (e-book | print), and The Old Capital (e-book | print).
October 19, 1987
Stock markets around the world crashed on "Black Monday." In the United States, the Dow Jones average fell by 508 points, a 22.6% decline; that's the largest percentage decline in the Dow's history. As with most things economic, it's difficult to pinpoint causes. The market may have been overvalued, and automatic computerized trading may have helped to make the fall worse once it began. In A First-Class Catastrophe (e-book | e-audio | print), Diana B. Henriques reports on the complicated series of events that led to the crash, and asks whether we have learned the right lessons.