Prizeman

In much the same fashion as a sweepstakes victor gets his good news, in Seattle, Wash. last week Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was awakened in his rented house over-looking Puget Sound to be told by his wife (Actress Carlotta Monterey) that he had just won $39,314. Professor Sophus Keith Wintrier of the University of Washington had telephoned her that the Associated Press had telephoned him that the Nobel Foundation had awarded Playwright O'Neill its 1936 literature prize and the newspaper boys were on their way out. Lounging in old pants and sweater at the side of Professor Winther, his good friend and official biographer, Eugene O'Neill was soon telling reporters how it felt to win a Nobel Prize.

"I feel," said the nation's greatest dramatist, "like a horse that has been, given a blue ribbon. I am surprised, too."

Well might Playwright O'Neill have felt surprised at receiving this generous share of the dead Swedish dynamite inventor's money, along with the world's most coveted literary honor. As a rule the Swedish Academy scrupulously attempts to see that no one nation or branch of literature gets more than its share of Nobel Prizes. The literary prize was not awarded last year. Since 1930, therefore, it has been given just five times, twice to U. S. citizens (Sinclair Lewis, 1930; Eugene O'Neill, 1936), thrice to dramatists (John Galsworthy, 1932; Luigi Pirandello, 1934; Eugene O'Neill, 1936). Even the man who holds the record of winning the Pulitzer Prize three times could hardly have expected the Nobel lightning to bunch its hits so closely.

The first Pulitzer Prize Eugene O'Neill won was for Beyond the Horizon in 1920. Next was for Anna Christie in 1922. Third was for Strange Interlude six years later. Notable for literary fertility as well as sombre profundity, he has authored 35 plays in which theatrical statisticians have discovered only five free from murder, death, suicide or insanity. In the other 30 are to be found six suicides, six cases of insanity, ten murders, 19 deaths. These courageous but maladjusted characters, according to Professor Winther, are one-&-all undone by the tragedy of harboring romantic illusions, the basic O'Neill theme. Now 48, thrice-married Playwright O'Neill has by his first wife a son who is an instructor at Yale. There are also a son and daughter by Mrs. O'Neill No. 2. Most of the time Eugene & Mrs. O'Neill No. 3 live in a Spanish house on the beach at Sea Island, Ga. There the playwright, who claims to have sailed in everything from tramp steamers to kayaks in his seagoing youth, puts in a full day's work every day on his dramas, the longest of which to date, Mourning Becomes Electra, lasted all afternoon and evening. The work which currently occupies Playwright O'Neill will make Electra look like a vaudeville turn. It is an octology, first two plays of which are to be produced by the Theatre Guild, perhaps next autumn and winter. The octology will cover 125 years in the life of a U. S. family in various parts of the U. S. The section dealing with the first transcontinental railways and the settling of the Pacific Northwest is what took him to Seattle this autumn. Of this prodigious show, Eugene O'Neill said jocularly last week: "People will be seeing it for years. It will go on and on. And I hope, after all eight plays have been produced once, somebody will take a chance and run them off on successive nights. That will knock the audience cold and they'll never want to see another play."

Unlike Novelist Lewis, first U. S. writer to win the Nobel Prize, shy Playwright O'Neill promptly announced he would be "unable to arrange his affairs in time to be in Stockholm for the presentation ceremony Dec. 10."

To a man, U. S. literary folk applauded this year's prize selection.

In Britain, bumbled George Bernard Shaw: "An excellent decision. ... I don't remember whether any play writer has had the prize since I got it ten or eleven years ago."

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