LITERARY ROVER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 19 December 1936, Page 4

LITERARY ROVER

■ «<!s)►■ CAREER OF EUGENE O’NEILL (By Air Mail—From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON, 19lh November. The career of Eugene O’Neill, the distinguished writer to whom the Nobel Prize of £7,000 for literature lias just been awarded, has been as adventurous and varied a roving experience as that of our own Poet Laureate, Masefield. O’Neill has been in turn, clerk, actor, gold prospector, sailor, bar tender, an experience he shares with Masefield, draughtsman, reporter. and odd-job man. Yet he is still two years short of the fifties, and for the last thirteen years has been established as one of the leading modern playwrights. He is an exceedingly modest, even shy, celebrity, and is said to' have actually seen only tlire of all his many plays acted on the stage otherwise than at rehearsal. But though he shirks first-night author’s publicity, and can with difficulty be coaxed into dining out at a restaurant, he has three times faced the marriage ordeal.