A Portrait of a GeniusOne of America's finest playwrights, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill's great tragedies were greatly influenced by his own experiences with his dysfunctional family. He used these events to build one of the most successful careers of the early 20th century, winning countless awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, four Pulitzer Prizes, the Antoinette Perry Prize, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award . From all these Greek tragedies was born his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! a period piece set at his summer home in New London, CT. O'Neill called this piece "the other side of the coin", meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have been like, rather than what he believed it had been. (as seen in his magnum opus, Long Day's Journey into Night). These two plays are his two most autobiographical plays, Long Day's Journey dramatizing his family and Ah, Wilderness! in parallel.Born in a Broadway hotel room on October 16, 1888, Eugene O'Neill was the second child of James and Ella O'Neill. Both an Irish immigrant and a devout Catholic, James was an actor famous for his portrayal of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, a production which saw over 6,000 performances. He later complained that “this long enslavement to a single role had prevented him from linking his name with Hamlet in the memory of mankind” (Durant, 49). His brother Jamie, ten years older, was brilliant but erratic. Her delivery was particularly difficult for Ella, so a doctor prescribed morphine to ease the pain. She and Eugene followed James on tour for the next several years, sometimes nursing from behind the scenes. In 1895, Eugene returned to New York to attend the Mount Saint-Vincent boarding school and later the De La Salle Institute. During these years, his family summered at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. When Eugène was 13, he discovered that his mother had become addicted to morphine because of the pain that followed her childbirth. Additionally, his brother was an alcoholic. These two events tormented him for years and had a considerable impact on his problems with writing and alcohol later in his life. At this time he also became interested in the controversial works of writers such as Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Nietzsche and Swinburne. Eugene attended Princeton University for a year, but when he was suspended following a drunken exploit, he chose not to return to school..