Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill is a four time Pulittzer prize winning playwright. He was born in 1888 . His father was an Irish -American actor, so Eugene grew up on around the stage. Eugene O'Neill went to Princten University. After that he worked as a clerk in New York City. From 1909 to 1912 he prospected for gold in Honduras, managed a theater group for his father, went to South America and south Africa as a seaman, and worked on a newspaper in New London , Connecticut. In 1912 he contracted a mild case of tuberculosis, while he was in the hospital recovering, he started writing plays. ten years later he won a Pulitzer prize for Beyond the Horizon . He also won Pulitzer's for three other plays:Strange Interlude, Anna Christie,and Long Days Journey into night. he wrote other well known plays such as,The Emperor Jones, Mourning becomes Electra, Wilderness Moon of the Caribbees and Days Without End.In 1936 he was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature. He died in 1953 from a crippling nervous disorder. In his work O'Neill tried to define people and their problems. He brought philosophical depth and symbolism into the American theater. His work raised the standards of most later American Playwrights, which is why many consider him to be one , if not the most, important writer in the American Theater.
Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams is a two time Pulitzer prize winning playwright . He was born in Columbus,Mississippi on Marh 26,1911. His parents named him Thomas Lanier Williams. he grew up in St.Louis, Missouri and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. In 1945, he had his first Broadway production, The Glass Menagerie. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for the best play of the season. It was also made into a film in 1950. In 1947, he wrote A Street Car Named Desire. It has been called the best play ever written by an American . Tennessee Williams won his first Pulitzer Prize for it, and in 1952 it was made into a move. In 1958, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . He also wrote other well known plays, Summer and Smoke(1948),The Rose Tattoo(1950),Night of the Iguana(1961). The Last play he ever wrote was Clothes for a Summer Hotel. He died in 1983 at the age of seventy-two.
-For more Information on these two men, go to Encarta Encyclopedia,1997
By MItch
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