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Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in a hotel room in New York on 16th October, 1888, the third son of James O'Neill and Ella Quinlan, both of Irish immigrant stock. Versions of their experience recur throughout their son's dramatic writing, culminating in the intimately autobiographical, Long Day's Journey into Night (1939). James O'Neill, an actor who early in his career had played classical roles, including Shakespeare with Edwin Booth, succumbed to popular and financial success on the melodramatic stage. Among other roles, he played Christ in Salmi Morse's The Passion, but it was as Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, that he became a matinee idol, a role which he was acting for the 1400th time when O'Neill was born and would continue to play until 1913, eventually recording it on silent film. Family life was unstable. O'Neill's mother frequently accompanied her husband on tour and, although they had a long-standing summer home, Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut, the family was constantly on the move, and their son's education, in a variety of boarding schools, was uneven. The greater instability came from James O'Neill's heavy drinking and Ella's addiction to morphine. This, which O'Neill discovered only at the age of 13, had begun following the loss in infancy of her second son, Edmund, and the difficult birth of O'Neill himself. His brother Jamie, ten years his senior, was brilliant but erratic. Sexually debauched, drinking heavily, employed only spasmodically as an actor and constantly dependent on his father, he was a glamorous and influential figure for O'Neill. Suspended from Princeton after a drunken exploit, O'Neill chose not to return to university. A secret marriage to Kathleen Jenkins in 1909 resulted in a child, Eugene Junior, but O'Neill hardly lived with them and the marriage was formally ended by divorce three years later. He, meanwhile, went on an unsuccessful gold prospecting expedition to Honduras and, over the next few years, largely supported by his father, lived in a variety of places, including, when in a state of destitution, Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires he tried a succession of jobs, including assistant manager and, later, actor with his father's company, a brief stretch as an able seaman, and reporter on the local New London Telegraph. In 1912, living in a New York flophouse, he attempted suicide with veronal. In December, tuberculosis having been diagnosed, he entered Gaylord Sanatorium, where he stayed for five months. There, always a voracious reader, he was introduced to the plays of Brieux, Shaw, Yeats and Strindberg and, encouraged by his doctor, began to write plays himself. Throughout 1913-14 he wrote obsessively. Impressed as he had already been by Alla Nazimova's New York season of Ibsen plays in 1907 and the visit of the Irish Players in 1911, these first efforts are melodramatic in language and plot but, albeit crudely, they demonstrate an excited response to a range of avant garde European writing. With such titles as "Thirst" and "Recklessness", they were published in 1914 at O'Neill's father's expense. A three act play, "Servitude", and other short pieces, dismissed and, as he thought, destroyed as clumsy apprentice pieces, surfaced in an unauthorised edition as "Lost" Plays of Eugene O'Neill (1950). In 1914 he entered George Pierce Baker's play-writing course at Harvard. Although he didn't return for the second year, he took from Baker the practice of ordering his ideas through detailed scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]