Eugene O'Neill - New York, NY - Irish-American Historic Places on Waymarking.com

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in the Barrett Hotel at 1500 Broadway on October 16, 1888. His father was an Irish immigrant actor named James O'Neill and his mother was Mary Ellen Quinlan. He attended a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and then Princeton University, for one year. He was employed by the New London (CT) Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting.

Attempting to recover from depression, alcoholism, tuberculosis he turned to full-time writing. The struggle to overcome his medical problems of his youth would later inspired his greatest play, Long Day's Journey Into Night, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize 1957.

In 1916 he joined the Provincetown Players. They performed many of his early works in their both in Provincetown in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. For his 1920 Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He followed with Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and the comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933).

In 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Next The Iceman Cometh was written in 1939 to be followed by Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943).

Eugene O'Neill died on November 27, 1953. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, MA. His birthplace is now a Starbucks in the middle of Times Square. A bronze plaque on the outside wall of Starbucks contains a image Eugene O'Neill and the following inscription: