ABSTRACT
After Eugene O'Neill had spent several years traveling about the country with his father, James O'Neill, who was playing in The Count of Monte Cristo, and a few more bumming all over the world, he fell ill; and while recovering in a sanatorium, decided he wanted to write plays. His first plays are the product of his romantic youth and a desire to write for the stage. After O'Neill had exhausted the vein of mood and atmosphere derived from his early experiences of bumming, he ceased to write melodrama for its own sake, and developed an interest in people he had known or heard about. Beginning perhaps with The Hairy Ape, and continuing through The Fountain, The Great God Brown, Marco Millions, Lazarus Laughed, and Dynamo, Mr. O'Neill's character studies are interspersed with, and finally superseded by, plays in which the author shows no interest in the concrete, and assumes the role of prophet.
