"Our emotions are a better guide than our thoughts," Carpenter quoted him. "They are the deep undercurrent whereas our thoughts are often only the . . . surface reactions." Rarely successful as a poet or philosopher, he still excelled at conveying the anguish of being alive. O'Neill, wrote a
Time reviewer, "[could] seize a blase Broadway crowd and wring it dry, half from fatigue, half from an emotional buffeting that no other American playwright ever inflicted on an audience. [He] could do what only a major artist can do: make his public share in the life of his private demons."
A Troubled Childhood
Until his mid-twenties O'Neill wrote little, but he encountered a great deal of pain that informed his later work. His torments began with his family, displayed as the Tyrone clan in Long Day's Journey into Night. So painful and personal was this work that O'Neill would not allow it to be made public until after he was dead--preferably, not for decades after. O'Neill's father, James, rose from poverty to become one of nineteenth-century America's most popular actors. Obsessed with financial security, he toured the country for years performing The Count of Monte Cristo, a crowd-pleasing melodrama of betrayal, suffering, revenge, and triumph.
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