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A Portrait of a Genius
One of America's finest playwrights, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill's great tragedies were greatly influenced by his own experiences with his dysfunctional family. He used these occurrences to craft one of the most successful careers in the earliest 20th century, earning countless awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature, four Pulitzer Prizes, Antoinette Perry Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Out of all of these Greek-like tragedies there emerged his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!; a period piece set in his summer home of New London, CT. O'Neill referred to this play as the "other side of the coin", meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have been, rather than what he believed it to have been (as seen in his magnum opus, Long Day's Journey into Night). These two plays are his two most auto-biographical plays, Long Day's Journey dramatizing his family, and Ah, Wilderness! paralleling it.
Born in a Broadway hotel room on October 16th, 1888, Eugene O'Neill was the second child of James and Ella O'Neill. Both Irish immigrants and devout Catholics, James was an actor most famous for his portrayal of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, a production that ran over 6,000 performances. He later complained that "this long enslavement to one role had kept him from binding his name to Hamlet in the memory of mankind" (Durant, 49). His brother Jamie, ten years his senior, was brilliant but erratic. His birth was a particularly difficult birth for Ella, so a doctor prescribed morphine to help with the pain. She and Eugene followed James on tour for the next several years, sometimes nursing from the wings.
In 1895 Eugene returned to New York to attend the Mt. St. Vincent boarding school and later the De La Salle Institute. During these years, his family summered at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. When Eugene was 13, he discovered that his mother had become addicted to morphine due to the pain following his birth. Also, his learned of his brother was an alcoholic. These two events plagued him for years to come and greatly impacted his writing and alcohol problem later in life. At this time he also became engrossed in the controversial work of writers such as Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Nietzsche and Swinburne. Eugene attended Princeton University for a year, but when suspended following a drunken exploit he chose to not return to school.
Good evening and welcome to tonight’s episode of Learning Literature. Tonight we will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Gattaca by analysing the techniques text producers employ to construct representations of social issues relating to marginalised groups. We will focus on two classic pieces of literature, Ken Kessey’s, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca. Through a range of techniques, the text producers have included representations of freedom and independence, power, as well as discrimination in each of their respective texts.
Hugh Wheeler was one of the most unique playwrights of all time. He was innovative in his storytelling skills and could challenge the most prolific writer. In his life, he wrote numerous plays and over 30 mystery novels under three different pseudonyms. However, his award winning works included the play Sweeney Todd, Candide, and A Little Night Music. Take a look at Wheeler’s life and also, look at each of these works. See inside the man and the brilliant playwright.
When he was fifteen years old, his mother died from appendicitis. From fifteen years of age to his college years, he lived in an all-white neighborhood. From 1914-1917, he shifted from many colleges and academic courses of study as well as he changed his cultural identity growing up. He studied physical education, agriculture, and literature at a total of six colleges and universities from Wisconsin to New York. Although he never completed a degree, his educational pursuits laid the foundation for his writing career.
While reading Cyrano de Bergerac, I found myself often wondering whether or not Cyrano had led a happy life. Actually, I never once wondered that, but that is irrelevant, because Cyrano’s happiness is the focus of this essay. Was he happy? Truth be told, I cannot say for sure. If we look upon his life, it would seem that he was a bit of a martyr, always sacrificing his happiness for the sake of others. This is probably the case, but I do not believe that he led his life with his happiness as any sort of goal. That will be a defining case in my argument. What I really believe is that he simply did not care about his happiness. In that sense, he did not so much sacrifice it, as he annexed and divided it when he saw fit. To a further extent, this apathy towards himself probably came from a low self-worth, almost certainly spawned not from his elephantine nose, but the fair maiden Roxanne. Finally, the nose itself, the very icon of de Bergerac, was probably not the problem that Cyrano believed it to be. All of this, however obscure it may seem, is crucial to the question posed of me now.
Hawthorne’s impoverishment probably began with the untimely death of his father, and continued until 1857. He had no money for a college education. Gloria C. Erlich in “The Divided Artist and His Uncles” states that “Robert Manning made the essential decisions in the lives of the Hawthorne children and is well known as the uncle who sent Hawthorne to college” (35). After graduation from Bowdoin College Hawthorne spent twelve years in his room at home in an intense effort to make something of himself literarily. The Norton Anthology: American Literature states:
Franco Zeffirelli portrayed a more effective version of the famous to be or not be soliloquy by having it set below in the family mortuary. Having violently rejected Ophelia, Hamlet climbs down the stoned stairs of the medieval castle and into the cellar where all his ancestors’ burial tombs lie, including his father’s. Surrounding himself in tombs and skeletons, he intones the to be or not to be speech in isolation and darkness. Having this particular set design, Zeffirelli enhanced the scene by creating a cold, dark, and suspenseful atmosphere. The family mortuary set design was eerie and melancholic which added realism into the speech as it allowed the audience to really see the manifestation of death that Hamlet contemplated. It also added physical emotion into the soliloquy as the scene contrasted death and Hamlet so closely with all the dead royals in their tombs, showing how deep Hamlet’s thoughts on life and death were rooted in his mind. Therefore, Zeffirelli’s use of the set design helped to create a more intense scene that enriched the soliloquy.
In Making History Hugh O'Neill was a well-liked character who also proved himself not only a good man, but intelligent and sensible. He inspires a large amount of sympathy in the audience. O?Neill had been fighting, backed by the Irish population, for Spain's support to rid themselves of the English for many years.
O'Neill's scorn of ritualism, which is typical of the expressionists, is evident in his plays. The expressionists believed that humanity is out of kilter with nature, and man's obsession with materialism and machines is a factor in the deadening of the soul. O'Neill was a man described by Joseph Golden as being
Phelps, William L. "Eugene O'Neill, Dramatist." Eugene O'Neill, Dramatist. The New York Times, 19 June 1921. Web. 07 Jan. 2014. .
William Shakespeare was one of the most memorable play writers in history. However, William may have been given false credit. Many people believe that he may not author the plays. In fact, there is much evidence that shows that he did not author the plays.
As a teenager, Jung led a solitary life. He did not care for school, and shied away from competition. When he went to boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, he was the victim of jealous harassment, and learned to use sickness as an excuse. He later went on to the University of Basel, intending to study archaeology, but instead decided to study medicine. After working under the famous neurologist, Krofft-Ebing, he discovered psychiatry. After graduating, Jung worked at a mental hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler (who later discovered and named schizophrenia). In 1903, he married and at this time he was also teaching classes at the University of Zurich, working at his own private practice, and working on his theory of word association. He finally met Freud, in 1907, and they developed a friendship as the two compared theories. Their friendship eventually ended, and soon afterwards came WWI and a rough time of self-examination for Jung (which then led to his theories of personality). He retired as a psychiatrist in 1946, and died fifteen years later.
Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was born in Augsburg, Germany in 1898. He then attended university. in Munich in 1917. It was while he was at university that he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, which was the first event to influence him.
Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in New York City. His father, James O’Neill, was a popular actor, and introduced Eugene O’Neill to the theater at an early age. After being expelled from Princeton in 1906, O’Neill worked as a gold prospector in Honduras and later as a seaman in the New York area. Soon O’Neill became a regular at bars and clubs in New York City. In 1912, O’Neill contracted tuberculosis. It was during his recovery that O’Neill began to write plays. He wrote many plays and is one of the greatest American dramatists. O’Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes—Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1957). Eugene O’Neill also received the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature. O’Neill was given the Nobel Prize, “for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy” (<http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/literature/1936a.html>).
be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening it up
Born October 16, 1888 to Mary Ellen and James O’Neill in a New York City Hotel Room, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill had a rough childhood. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother, stressed over a his difficult childbirth and the loss of one of her sons three years before, became addicted to morphine shortly after his birth. Most of Eugene’s early childhood was spent in on the move, traveling across the United States with his family because of his father. His father was a well-known touring actor because of his part in the Count of Monte Cristo, and was the one who introduced him to the theatrical