Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill (1888 to 1953) was an American playwright whose plays helped bring the dramatic techniques of realism, earlier associated with Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg, to the American stage. His best known tragedy, Long Day's Journey into Night, is often placed among the finest American plays of the twentieth century, alongside A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman. O'Neill was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 1957 Tony Award for Best Play, and he remains the only playwright to have won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. His plays were among the first to use American vernacular speech and to centre on characters at the fringes of society, people who struggle to keep their hopes alive before sliding into disillusion and despair. He wrote very few comedies, and only Ah, Wilderness! is well known; nearly all his other plays carry some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.