O'Neill shipped out as a seaman in 1910 and did odd jobs in Buenos Aires, spending almost 6 months as a panhandler on the waterfront before going to sea again. Back in New York in 1911, he spent several weeks drinking in Jimmy the Priest's saloon before shipping out to England. He returned in August to his old hangout. Almost half his published plays show his interest in the sea.
In 1912 O'Neill hit bottom. His marriage was dissolved, his attempt at suicide failed, and he contracted tuberculosis. But he also decided to become a dramatist. He was released from the sanitarium in June 1913.
Early Plays
Tall and thin, dark-eyed and handsome, with a brooding sensitivity, O'Neill was a man of many paradoxical qualities. Though he was ready to work, he was by no means ready to change his way of living completely. During the next year he wrote prolifically. Except for Bound East for Cardiff, these early plays are finger exercises. With his father's aid, five of these one-act plays were published in 1914. On the basis of this work and with the assistance of the critic Clayton Hamilton, O'Neill joined George Pierce Baker's playwriting class at Harvard in September 1914.
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