O'Neill, the third son of James O'Neill and Ellen Quinlan, was born in a New York hotel on 6th October, 1 888, and there was never to be any stability of background in his life. His father, James O'Neill, was one of the bestknown of American actors, becoming especially popular for his performance i in a dramatisation of Monte Cristo, which for years on end he acted on tours i through the country. This, as is now common knowledge through O'Neill's Long Da's Journey into Night, became a source of regret to O'Neill; his father, who had been praised by Edwin Booth for his performance as Othello, had, the son believed, dissipated, his talents in popular melodrama. i Boyhood: Sense of Insecurity
O'Neill accompanied his father on his long acting tours, and this further increased his sense of instability. This sense of insecurity is reflected in hisi plays and in his restless search for a permanent place of residence in his later years. Bowen comments: "Wherever he lived, the houses he bought werei always big, as if their very size would insure stability and permanence. They never did. It seems not far-fetched to discern in his cult of the play, whosei length defied ordinary theatre-arrangemments, another manifestation of this i desire for size and stability: the other side of the picture is, of course, to bei seen in his restless experimentation, which never allowed him exactly to repeat a way of writing he had once essayed. We shall see, too, how his extra-i dramatic pre-occupations were not long-lived, he could touch on politics, oni religion, and on a cloudy form of nature mysticism, but his concern with such things was not enduring enough to be deep. What did recur was indeedi something that gave to his best plays a special strength and finally becamei an overwhelming love-the remembering of past years, a remembering that i was made up of persons briefly known, scenes fugitively visited, family-i relationships now dissolved. Only in the building-up of dramatic patterns out i of these fragments could he achieve the firm structure that outside his plays was not possible."
