Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was an American playwright, the son of the touring actor James O'Neill, who went to sea as a young man and began writing plays after a stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium in 1912-1913. With the Provincetown Players and then on Broadway he brought expressionism, masks and psychological tragedy to the American stage. He won four Pulitzer Prizes, the last posthumously for Long Day's Journey into Night, and in 1936 became the first American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
