Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, b. Oct. 16, 1888, d. Nov. 27, 1953, America's preeminent playwright, led the fledgling early-20th-century U.S. theater into the mainstream of world drama. Tennessee Williams observed: "O'Neill gave birth to the American theatre and died for it." During a lengthy artistic career (1913-43) in which he won four Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon (first produced in 1920), Anna Christie (1921), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) and the Nobel Prize for literature (1936), the innovative O'Neill held up a mirror to American society and functioned as social critic and moral guide.