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THE EMPEROR JONES( (1920) Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) American playwright Eugene O’Neill was born on 16 October 1888 in a hotel room overlooking the Times Square on Broadway in New York. His father James O’Neill, an actor-manager, made a small fortune by touring in a popular melodrama The Count of Mont Cristo, playing the title role for over 3, 000 performances in 25 years. Yet O’Neill’s family was tragically disturbed: his mother was a drug addict and his brother a confirmed alcoholic. O’Neill’s childhood and youth were crowded with experiences incredible in variety: touring the country with his father; attending different boarding schools; sampling, under his brother’s influence, a life of dissipation with chorus girls and in saloons; being virtually kicked out of Princeton University after only one year; trying his hand at office jobs he detested; arranging a secret marriage; gold-prospecting in Honduras; playing adulterous mate to provide grounds for divorce; shipping out as a seaman; sinking into dereliction as a heavy-drinking bum; and barely surviving a suicide attempt. With an onset of TB, he was sent to a sanatorium in 1912. It was during the six months of confinement there that O’Neill, sobered by his illness, reflected on his past, read more deeply in world drama and determined to become a dramatist. Earnest in purpose and contemptuous of superficiality, O’Neill shaped his memory, thought and torture into forty-nine published plays. He destroyed some other plays that he wrote but illness prevented him from completing. Many of O’Neill’s early one-act plays were produced by the Provincetown Players, at first in Massachusetts and later in Greenwich Village, New York. Critical recognition came with the Broadway production of his early full-length play Beyond the Horizon in 1920, which won for him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Throughout his career, O’Neill experimented freely with dramatic forms and theater techniques, being equally adept in the style