American · b. 1918
Eugene O'Neill dragged American theater into the twentieth century. Before him, the American stage offered melodrama and entertainment; after him, it could contain tragedy. The playwright won four Pulitzer Prizes and the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature—the only American dramatist so honored. His late autobiographical plays, particularly "Long Day's Journey into Night," achieved a searing honesty about family dysfunction and addiction that he forbade to be performed until after his death. O'Neill proved that American experience could sustain the weight of theatrical ambition previously reserved for European masters.