Eugene O'Neill, who was born in 1888, in New York, was a leading American drama writer and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. His father was a successful touring actor. Because of that, Eugene spent his early childhood in hotels, on trains, and backstage. Although later in his life he grew to hate his father for not giving him security（安全感）in his early years and a loving, comfortable family, he had the theater in his blood.
As a student, O'Neill went to boarding schools（寄宿制学校）but spent the summers in a moderate house his family owned. He left Princeton University in 1907, only about one year after he entered it, to start what he later called his real education in “life experience”。 At the age of 24, he was employed as a reporter and poetry column writer for the New London Telegraph, where he worked for only a few months.
O'Neill didn't cut a figure in playwriting until the summer of 1916, when he was in a peaceful village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where some young writers and artists had founded an experimental theater. Before that, he had written awkward plays that were hardly accepted by the mainstream of American theater. While O'Neill was only one of those whose plays were produced by the theater, he led the group to success because of his contribution within the next few years. Between 1916 and 1920, the theater produced all of O'Neill's one-act plays. By the time his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway on February 2, 1920 at the Morosco Theater, the young playwright already had a small fame.
Theater critics（评论家）spoke highly of Beyond the Horizon for its tragic realism. The play brought O'Neill more public attention, as well as his first Pulitzer Prize. Besides that, he won another three for Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Day's Journey into Night. Over the next two decades, O'Neill continued to gain fame nationally and globally. He became the most widely translated and produced dramatist after Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw.
【小题1】What might inspire O'Neill's love for theater?| A．His father's job. | B．The support of his family. |
| C．Hotel rooms he had lived in. | D．Stories he had heard on trains. |
| A．He didn't want to study in a boarding school. |
| B．He wanted to receive real education from life. |
| C．He got a job from the New London Telegraph. |
| D．He was quite unsatisfied with the university life. |
| A．Show interest. | B．Hold a degree. |
| C．Attract attention. | D．Receive an award. |
| A．It inspired him to create another three dramas. |
| B．It drew theater critics' attention to tragic realism. |
| C．It helped him win more fame in the field of theater. |
| D．It made him the most widely translated dramatist. |
