“I HAVE NEVER HAD A HOME”
The Transient Life of Eugene O’Neill

In Hughie, the passing encounter between a "Broadway sport" and a hotel clerk reveals a world in which everything seems to be in passing - a world defined by transience.

Erie, the "sport," makes his home in a hotel; his collocutor is the latest in the hotel's ever-changing series of night clerks; and while the clerk marks the passing of night by counting the El trains going by, Erie recalls the clerk's recently deceased predecessor Hughie, whose ever-present name is a constant testament to the transience of life itself.

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was no stranger to transient life. The son of a popular stage actor, O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in 1888 and spent his early childhood touring with his father. After a succession of boarding schools, he entered Princeton University in 1906 but was promptly expelled.

O'Neill's most consistent home was the cottage in New London where his family summered between tours; his most consistent activity was tagging along to his brother Jamie's favorite bars.

In 1909 O'Neill married Kathleen Jenkins but did not settle into family life. He set sail for Central America a few months later, just before Kathleen gave birth to their son, Eugene Jr. Returned from sea, O'Neill embarked on a stint of vagrancy (and heavy drinking) in New York City.

In 1912 he and Jenkins divorced; shortly thereafter, he attempted suicide in his boarding house. By the end of the year O'Neill contracted tuberculosis and was confined to a sanatorium. Removed from his usual recourses, O'Neill turned his focus inward and, determined "to be an artist or nothing," began earnestly to write plays.

With a new sense of purpose, O'Neill began a year-long playwriting course at Harvard in the fall of 1914. Upon returning to New York, his writing led him to a group of experimental young artists based in Provincetown, Massachusetts. With the Provincetown Players, O'Neill debuted as a playwright in the summer of 1916 with a short sea-faring play called Bound East for Cardiff.

The company soon relocated to Greenwich Village, where they produced several more of O'Neill's one-acts - many of which drew on his earlier maritime stint. Though O'Neill's style was similar to the popular melodramas of the time, his subject matter was subtler and more serious, and it quickly garnered critical attention.

In 1920, O'Neill's first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

In playwriting, O'Neill had found artistic permanence, but his personal life remained inconstant. In 1918 he had married fellow writer Agnes Boulton, with whom he had two children. Between 1920 and 1925 he lost his father, mother and brother.

In 1928, he left Agnes for actress Carlotta Monterey. After a three-year European tour, the couple moved to Long Island until 1937, when they built a house in California.

"I have never had a home," O'Neill remarked retrospectively, "never had a chance to establish root."

During those un-rooted decades, however, O'Neill also wrote over 20 full-length plays. He received two more Pulitzer Prizes - for Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928) - and became the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize (1936).

Daring to treat the stage as a serious literary medium, O'Neill revolutionized American theater by replacing melodrama with realism and expressionism. He applied the themes and forms of Greek tragedy to American family drama in Desire Under the Elms (1925) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

And he ultimately turned his craft upon himself, drawing on personal experience for his final masterpieces. Coincidentally, these introspective works - including The Iceman Cometh (1939), and Long Day's Journey Into Night (written in 1941 and awarded a posthumous Pulitzer in 1957) - came out of a more settled period in O'Neill's life, sequestered at Tao House under Carlotta's protective watch. Hughie, also written in 1941, was intended as part of an eight-part collection of subtly-drawn studies in bygone lives.

In spite of his success, even playwriting proved fleeting: In 1944, neurodegenerative illness forced O'Neill to stop writing. His final years were spent in frustration, augmented by further familial turbulence. He disowned his 18-year-old daughter Oona for marrying 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin; he estranged himself from his son Shane, who was arrested for drug possession in 1948; and in 1950, his firstborn son Eugene Jr. committed suicide.

Haunted by transience to the end of his life, O'Neill died in a Boston hotel room in 1953. "Born in a hotel room, and Goddammit, died in one!" were his supposed last words.