The Emperor Jones is a 1920 tragic play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill that tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African American and a former Pullman porter, who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
Charles Sidney Gilpin in The Emperor Jones in 1920
Brutus Jones, played by Charles Sidney Gilpin, removes his shoes to facilitate his flight through the jungle in the original Provincetown Playhouse production of The Emperor Jones (1920)
Brutus Jones (Charles S. Gilpin, left) at a slave auction (Scene 5)
Under the spell of hallucination, Jones fires at the wraiths of an auctioneer and a Southern planter (Scene 5)
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists 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. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
Portrait of O'Neill by Alice Boughton
Birthplace plaque (1500 Broadway, northeast corner of 43rd and Broadway, New York City), presented by Circle in the Square
Portrait of O'Neill as a child, c. 1893
Statue of O'Neill as a boy, sitting and writing, overlooking the harbor of New London, Connecticut