Eugene O’Neill’s time of dereliction in Buenos Aires

Pages:93-94
Neelima Redhu (Extension lecturer, Department of English, Govt. College, Barwala, Hisar, Haryana)

Arthur Gelb’s remark sparked my renewed interest in the life and writings of Eugene O’Neill, the man who revolutionized theater in the United States and the only U.S. playwright to win the Nobel Prize. Gelb, formerly a theater critic for the New York Times, and his wife co-authored the most substantial recent biography of the playwright, O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo (Applause Books, 2000). This biography makes clear that Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, played a role in the life, creative quality, and development of O’Neill as strong as the complicated relationship with his dominating actor father, James. This story of O’Neill starts on a sidewalk in Montevideo, close to the main port of Uruguay which was built by the French in 1901, outside an old fashioned office window that bore the name Williams. In a high display window was a sailing ship, a tall ship with ragged, sand-yellow sails, looking as if it had been hit by a southern wind. Williams, shipping agents in the River Plate countries since the nineteenth century, still have offices in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. It was aboard one of the ships they handled that Eugene O’Neill left Argentina in 1911.