Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U. S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey into Night is numbered on the short list of the finest U. S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his few comedies, only one is well-known. Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. O'Neill was born in a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, on what was Longacre Square. A commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957.
The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which houses offices and the ABC Studios. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, of Irish descent; because his father was on tour with a theatrical company, accompanied by Eugene's mother, O'Neill was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he found his only solace in books, his father suffered from alcoholism. The O'Neill family reunited for summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in Connecticut, he briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford. He attended Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to, he may have been dropped for attending too few classes, been suspended for "conduct code violations," or "for breaking a window", or according to a more concrete but apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle into the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson", the future president of the United States. O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from alcoholism.
Despite this, he had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, fighting for improved living conditions for the working class using quick'on the job' direct action. O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater. After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays. O'Neill had been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. In the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by Professor George Baker, he did not complete the course. During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of America founder John Reed.
O'Neill had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. O'Neill was portrayed about the life of John Reed, his involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. O'Neill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays." Susan Glaspell describes a reading of Bound East for Cardiff that took place in the living room of Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook's home on Commercial Street, adjacent to the wharf, used by the Players for their theater: "So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff out of his trunk, Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished." The Provincetown Players performed many of O'Neill's early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and moved to Broadway. One of these early one acts written by O'Neill was The Web.
Written in 1913, this is the first time O'Neill explores the famous themes he thrives in in his career. The Web was one of O'Neill's first dramas; this one act began his interesting inclusion of the brothel world. This can be showcased. We see O'Neill explore memorable avenues within this play such a including a baby, born out of prostitution; this was a huge stepping stone as O'Neill is exploring fields in which have never before been explored with such success. O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, his first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U. S. occupation of Haiti, a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. His best-known plays include Anna Christie, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been.
In 1936 he received the
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
George S. Kaufman
George Simon Kaufman was an American playwright, theatre director and producer and drama critic. In addition to comedies and political satire, he wrote several musicals for the Marx Brothers and others. One play and one musical that he wrote won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama: You Can't Take It with You, Of Thee I Sing, he won the Tony Award as a Director, for the musical Guys and Dolls. George S. Kaufman was born to Joseph S. Kaufman, a hatband manufacturer, Nettie Meyers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he had Ruth. His other sister was Helen, nicknamed "Helse." He studied law for three months. He grew disenchanted and took on a series of odd jobs, selling silk and working in wholesale ribbon sales. Kaufman began contributing humorous material to the column that Franklin P. Adams wrote for the New York Mail, he became close friends with F. P. A. who helped him get his first newspaper job—humor columnist for The Washington Times—in 1912. By 1915 he was a drama reporter on The New York Tribune, working under Heywood Broun.
In 1917 Kaufman joined The New York Times, becoming drama editor and staying with the newspaper until 1930. Kaufman took his editorial responsibilities seriously. According to legend, on one occasion a press agent asked: "How do I get our leading lady's name in the Times?" Kaufman: "Shoot her." Kaufman's Broadway debut was September 4, 1918 at the Knickerbocker Theatre, with the premiere of the melodrama Someone in the House. He coauthored the play with Walter C. Percival, based on a magazine story written by Larry Evans; the play opened on Broadway during that year's serious flu epidemic, when people were being advised to avoid crowds. With "dour glee", Kaufman suggested that the best way to avoid crowds in New York City was to attend his play. In every Broadway season from 1921 through 1958, there was a play directed by Kaufman. Since Kaufman's death in 1961, there have been revivals of his work on Broadway in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s and the 2010s. Kaufman wrote only one play alone, The Butter and Egg Man in 1925.
With Marc Connelly, he wrote Merton of the Movies and Beggar on Horseback. According to his biography on PBS, "he wrote some of the American theater's most enduring comedies" with Moss Hart, their work includes Once in a Lifetime, Merrily We Roll Along, The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. For a period, Kaufman lived at 158 West 58th Street in New York City; the building would be the setting for Stage Door. It is now the Park Savoy Hotel. Despite his claim that he knew nothing about music and hated it in the theatre, Kaufman collaborated on many musical theatre projects, his most successful of such efforts include two Broadway shows crafted for the Marx Brothers, The Cocoanuts, written with Irving Berlin, Animal Crackers, written with Morrie Ryskind, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby. According to Charlotte Chandler, "By the time Animal Crackers opened... the Marx Brothers were becoming famous enough to interest Hollywood. Paramount signed them to a contract".
Kaufman was one of the writers who excelled in writing intelligent nonsense for Groucho Marx, a process, collaborative, given Groucho's skills at expanding upon the scripted material. Though the Marx Brothers were notoriously critical of their writers and Harpo Marx expressed admiration and gratitude towards Kaufman. Dick Cavett, introducing Groucho onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1972, told the audience that Groucho considered Kaufman to be "his god". While The Cocoanuts was being developed in Atlantic City, Irving Berlin was hugely enthusiastic about a song he had written for the show. Kaufman was less enthusiastic, refused to rework the libretto to include this number; the discarded song was "Always" a huge hit for Berlin, recorded by many popular performers. According to Laurence Bergreen, "Kaufman's lack of enthusiasm caused Irving to lose confidence in the song, and'Always' was deleted from the score of The Cocoanuts – though not from its creator's memory.... Kaufman, a confirmed misogynist, had had no use for the song in The Cocoanuts but his disapproval did not deter Berlin from saving it for a more important occasion."
The Cocoanuts would remain Irving Berlin's only Broadway musical – until his last one, Mr. President – that did not include at least one eventual hit song. Humor derived from political situations was of particular interest to Kaufman, he collaborated on the hit musical Of Thee I Sing, which won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, the first musical so honored, its sequel Let'Em Eat Cake, as well as one troubled but successful satire that had several incarnations, Strike Up the Band. Working with Kaufman on these ventures were Ryskind, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin. Kaufman, with Moss Hart, wrote the book to I'd Rather Be Right, a musical starring George M. Cohan as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, he co-wrote the 1935 comedy-drama First Lady. In 1945, Kaufman adapted H. M. S. Pinafore into Hollywood Pinafore. Kaufman contributed to major New York revues, including The Band Wagon with Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, his often
Sidney Howard
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind. Sidney Howard was born in Oakland, the son of Helen Louise and John Lawrence Howard, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1915 and went on to Harvard University to study playwriting under George Pierce Baker in his legendary "47 workshop." Along with other students of Harvard professor A. Piatt Andrew, Howard volunteered with Andrew's American Field Service, serving in France and the Balkans during World War I. After the war, Howard made use of his proficiency at foreign languages and translated a number of literary works from French, Spanish and German. A liberal intellectual whose politics became progressively more left-wing over the years, he wrote articles about labor issues for The New Republic and served as literary editor for the original Life magazine. In 1921, Howard's first play was produced on Broadway.
A neo-romantic verse drama set in the time of Dante, did not do well with audiences or critics. It was with his realistic romance They Knew What They Wanted three years that Howard established his reputation as a serious writer; the story of a middle-aged Italian vineyard owner who woos a young woman by mail with a false snapshot of himself, marries her, forgives her when she becomes pregnant by one of his farm hands, the play was praised for its un-melodramatic view of adultery and its tolerant approach to its characters. Theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it "a tender, merciful drama." They Knew What They Wanted won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was adapted three times into film and became the Broadway musical, The Most Happy Fella. Howard's career was anything but consistent. For every successful play he wrote, he saw several others close without making any money, his saving grace was. Lucky Sam McCarver, his next play, was an unsentimental account of the marriage of a New York speakeasy owner on his way up in the world with a self-destructive socialite on her way down.
It failed to attract audiences. With The Silver Cord, Howard had a major hit. A drama about a mother, pathologically close to her sons and works to undermine their romances, it starred Laura Hope Crews and was one of the most talked-about plays of the 1926-27 Broadway season, it was a story for a decade fascinated by talk of Freud, Oedipal complexes, family dysfunction. The Silver Cord is the only original play by Howard to outlive its era; the play was staged by regional theater companies through the late twentieth century, its first Off-Broadway production was mounted in 2013. The 1933 film of the play starred Irene Dunne and Joel McCrea, with Laura Hope Crews repeating her stage role. By 1930, Howard was "one of the most dashing figures on the Broadway scene." A prolific writer and a founding member of the Playwrights' Company, he wrote or adapted more than seventy plays. In 1922, Howard married actress Clare Eames, she starred in Howard's Lucky Sam McCarver and Ned McCobb's Daughter on Broadway and The Silver Cord in London.
Howard and Eames had a daughter, Jennifer Howard. The couple separated in 1927, Howard's anger at the disintegration of his marriage is reflected in his bitter satire of modern matrimony, Half Gods. Following the unexpected death of Eames in 1930, Howard in 1931 married Leopoldine Damrosch, daughter of the conductor Walter Johannes Damrosch, with whom he had three children. A particular admirer of the understated realism of French playwright Charles Vildrac, Howard adapted two of his plays into English, under the titles S. S. Tenacity and Michael Auclair. One of his greatest successes on Broadway was an adaptation of a French comedy by René Fauchois, The Late Christopher Bean. Yellow Jack, an historical drama about the war against yellow fever, was praised for its high-minded purpose and innovative staging when it premiered in 1934. "In his thinking, Howard was much a man of his time," Brooks Atkinson wrote. "He was a Wilsonian. He intended to write an ironic tragedy on the theme of the destruction of such a league that would be devoted to the service rather than the conquest of humanity, that made Yellow Jack such a forceful drama."Hired by Samuel Goldwyn, Howard worked in Hollywood at MGM and wrote several successful screenplays.
Despite his well-known left-wing political sympathies, he became a shrewd Hollywood insider. In 1932, Howard was nominated for an Academy Award for his adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith and again in 1936 for Dodsworth, which he had adapted for the stage in 1934, he wrote a screenplay as well for Lewis's most political book, the anti-Fascist novel It Can't Happen Here. The film was never made. (Studio offi
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph
The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph was an evening daily newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1927 to 1960. Part of the Hearst newspaper chain, it competed with the Pittsburgh Press and Post-Gazette until being purchased and absorbed by the latter paper; the Sun-Telegraph's history can be traced back through its 19th- and early 20th-century forebears: the Chronicle, Chronicle Telegraph, Sun. The Morning Chronicle was established on June 1841 by Richard George Berford. At first a semi-weekly paper, it became a daily on September 8 of the same year; the original editor was 19-year-old J. Heron Foster, who would be the founding editor of the Spirit of the Age and the Pittsburgh Dispatch. A weekly edition of the paper first appeared in November 1841 with the title The Iron City and Pittsburgh Weekly Chronicle. On August 30, 1851 the daily paper started issuing in the day, becoming the Evening Chronicle. Historian Leland D. Baldwin described the Chronicle's existence as "undistinguished for several decades".
On January 2, 1884, the Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle merged with the Pittsburgh Telegraph to form the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph. In 1892, the Chronicle Telegraph Building on Fifth Avenue gained brief notoriety as the site where anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. In October 1900 the paper sponsored the Chronicle Telegraph Cup, a postseason baseball series won by the Brooklyn Superbas over the Pittsburgh Pirates. Held only once, the contest was a precursor to the current World Series. Iron and steel manufacturer George T. Oliver a U. S. senator, purchased the evening Chronicle Telegraph in November 1900 to complement the morning paper he had acquired earlier in the year, the Commercial Gazette. The papers were soon housed under the same roof and exchanged or shared staff members. In 1915, a new eight-story building on the current site of the U. S. Steel Tower opened as home to the Chronicle Telegraph along with Oliver's merged and retitled morning paper, the Gazette Times.
Upon the death of George T. Oliver in 1919, control of the Chronicle Telegraph and Gazette Times passed to his sons George S. and Augustus K. Oliver; the Pittsburgh Sun was an evening paper first issued on March 1, 1906 by the publisher of the morning Pittsburgh Post. On August 1, 1927, William Randolph Hearst completed a purchase of the two Oliver papers, including the building, he coordinated the transaction with publisher Paul Block, who at the same time became owner of Pittsburgh's other morning-evening combination: the Post and Sun. An ensuing trade between the two buyers gave Hearst both evening dailies, which he merged to form the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, while Block created the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from the two morning papers; the first issues of the new publications rolled off the presses the next day. The deal stipulated that the Sun-Telegraph, but not the Post-Gazette, would publish on Sundays though the latter paper's predecessors had Sunday editions and the former's did not.
The combined Sunday circulation that the Post-Gazette would have inherited was instead transferred to the Sunday Sun-Telegraph. The Sun-Telegraph was patterned after Hearst's other twenty-five newspapers in its use of screaming headlines, large type, sensational reporting, unconventional picture layouts, splashes of color, front-page box scores. In the 1950s the "Sun-Telly" was losing subscribers and advertisers to its direct competitor in the evening and Sunday fields, the Pittsburgh Press, to a lesser degree the Post-Gazette; the Post-Gazette's co-publisher William Block Sr. recalled that "The Press, which had a great deal of newer equipment, was in a position to give news, better distribution, was killing on Sunday." In 1960 the Hearst organization sold its floundering Pittsburgh operation to the Post-Gazette, which in absorbing its rival gained a Sunday edition. The deal turned out badly for the purchaser: The Sunday edition proved unprofitable; these problems helped spur the Post-Gazette to enter into a joint operating agreement with the stronger Press in the following year.
The Post-Gazette bore the subtitle "Sun-Telegraph" from 1960 through 1977, though by late 1962 the subtitle's font size had shrunk to unnoticeable proportions. Andrews, J. Cutler. Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette: The First Newspaper West of the Alleghenies. Boston: Chapman & Grimes. Thomas, Clarke M.. Front-Page Pittsburgh: Two Hundred Years of the Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-4248-1
