I want to howl: Eugene O’Neill
John Lahr, 5 February 2015
If you were throwing a pity party among American playwrights, the antisocial, alcoholic, self-dramatising misery named Eugene Gladstone O’Neill would win the door prize. At the age of 21, already making a myth of his sense of doom, O’Neill was calling himself ‘the Irish luck kid’. By then, he’d been thrown out of Princeton (‘Ego’ was his nickname), fathered a son with his divorced first wife, caught syphilis in his wanderlust around South America as a merchant seaman, and attempted suicide in a Greenwich Village fleabag called ‘the Hell Hole’ by its permanently pie-eyed denizens.