ABSTRACT

When the Paterson Pageant took place on June 7, 1913, Eugene O’Neill had yet to write a play and had only four days earlier been discharged from the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he had spent five months under treatment for tuberculosis. Though Paterson would even­ tually exert a strong influence on O’Neill’s career, the playwright’s penchant for experimentation with class barriers was formed earlier and elsewhere. Before 1913, O’Neill had forged an identification with the working class that had shaped his social views1 while providing a store of literary material that would carry him well into his career. During his excursions as a seaman from 1909-1911, he had lived in forecastles, scrubbed decks, climbed rig­ gings, spliced rope, ate dried codfish and hardtack and befriended sailors who became the models for characters in several of his career-launching plays. In the British port of Southampton in 1911, he “found the stews and dives and saw drunken sailors crimped and shang-haid into bad ships” (Black 114) and had witnessed the Great General Strike of 1911, the “worst scare from labor in Britain’s history” (Sheaffer 196), which had paralyzed the country’s transportation, communications and food distribution systems for several days. O’Neill heard strike talk, sympathized with the workers,2 and later described similar events in “The Personal Equation” and The Hairy Ape.