Playwright Eugene O'Neill, born in NYC on October 16, 1888, is Buried in Boston

Photo of Eugene O'Neill, courtesy of PBS, An American Experience

Eugene O’Neill, one of the great American playwrights and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in a hotel on October 16, 1888 in New York City to parents Ella Quinlan and Irish actor James O’Neill.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, the highest literary honor in the world, and also won several Pulitzer Prizes for his plays.

O’Neill spent his formative years in New London, CT at Monte Cristo Cottage, the family’s summer home on Pequot Avenue. Later in life, O’Neill also spent considerable time in Massachusetts, taking a playwriting course at Harvard in 1914, then forming a troupe on Cape Cod called the Provincetown Players, which produced his play Bound East for Cardiff, in 1916.

In between, O'Neill led an adventurous life. As a sailor, shipping out of Boston, he traveled around the world, then headed down to Honduras to prospect for gold. He worked for awhile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, then jumped a tramp steamer to South Africa. Back in the states, he tried acting with his father's troupe, but was terrified of the stage. He turned to writing, working as a newspaper man and submitting occasional poems and 'nonsense' columns, before he took up writing plays.

Among his notable works: A Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electric, Emperor Jones and many others.

In 1928, according to author Susan Wilson, O’Neill’s play, Strange Interlude, was banned in Boston, but played to a sell-out audience in Quincy. 

O'Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work and in 1936 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy."

O’Neill lived in California for many years, but moved back to Marblehead, MA in 1948, by which time he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. He moved to Boston to be close to his physician, staying at the Hotel Shelton on Bay State Road, which is today a Boston University dormitory.

Forest Hills Cemetery

He died on November 27, 1953, at the hotel. O'Neill is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plains, a neighborhood of Boston. 

In 1967, the U.S Postal Service issued a commemorative one dollar stamp in honor of Eugene O'Neill, and is on display at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. 

O'Neill's grave is one of the stops on Boston's Irish Heritage Trail neighborhood sites.