Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O’Neill: Intertextual Inferences

Scholarship has not heretofore linked Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O’Neill and their masterpieces, Look Homeward, Angel and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, yet significant inferences may be made from their intertextuality Both works have been taken or mistaken for works of pure autobiography, but recent scholarship on O’Neill’s play has put the focus on the ways O’Neill partially fictionalized his family into the Tyrones, using whatever would serve his art, which might include elements of his reading.¹ The actual and intertextual connections between the novelist and the playwright, subtly ironic, invite speculation concerning bilateral influence, inspiration, and tribute in their two celebrated works. Wolfe seems to have admired O’Neill enough to have named his protagonist after him, and O’Neill, after Wolfe’s death, seems to have closely echoed particular portions, specifically chapters 34 and 39, of Wolfe’s long first novel in his greatest play. Uncovering these Wolfe–O’Neill biographical and textual intersections reveals not only an unrecognized possible source of some of O’Neill’s raw material and his genius in transformative invention but also may explain some of the misconceptions and mysteries associated with Long Day’s Journey Into Night. O’Neill’s access to details in Wolfe’s novel and his subsequent similar use of them suggest a canny transformation of his reading material and also document possible sources found in Wolfe’s art instead of O’Neill’s life for the Tyrone family drama. That scholars have not yet recognized these intertextualities may be attributed to their working in the separate areas of American fiction and drama.

That Wolfe named his protagonist after O’Neill is evident in the special notice he takes of O’Neill in his novels, plays, and letters; biographies and related documents about Wolfe also clearly record Wolfe’s admiration of O’Neill and other connections between the two writers. For example, Charmian Green writes about the influence of O’Neill’s expressionism on Wolfe’s play Mannerhouse and novel Look Homeward, Angel.² Only a few such linkages of these writers appear in the O’Neill archive or scholarship. Louis Sheaffer and Arthur and Barbara Gelb mention Wolfe only in passing in their biographies of O’Neill. Sheaffer quotes Hamilton Basso’s reflections on the similarity of authors and their characters, identifying Wolfe as “an obvious example” of “a person out of . . . his books.”³ Sheaffer and the Gelbs quote Wolfe’s descriptions of George Pierce Baker, depicted as Professor Hatcher in the autobiographical Of Time and the River, only to provide a thumbnail sketch of Baker, not to link Wolfe and O’Neill.⁴ However, Wolfe was constantly conscious of O’Neill’s alumni status in the course each took with Baker at different times. He followed his growing fame and his transformation of American drama into a serious art. Hoping to follow him in this respect, Wolfe also revealed a conflicted attitude, both admiring and envious, toward O’Neill.

The connection seems to have mattered more to Wolfe than it did to O’Neill but may have been more important for the latter than previously noticed, especially regarding some of the negative characteristics and behaviors of the patriarch James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey relating to his stinginess in the play, which contradicts the generosity of James O’Neill as he was known to his friends and family.⁵ Although Green argues that O’Neill influenced Wolfe, she and others have not seemed to notice that Wolfe may have contributed posthumously to Long Day’s Journey. If so, the name of O’Neill could be added to Robert Morgan’s list in his introduction to Scribner’s 2006 trade paperback edition of Look Homeward, Angel of prominent writers whom Wolfe influenced, making O’Neill the only playwright on the list.⁶

Wolfe and O’Neill: The Name of Eugene Gant

Scattered throughout the lengthy novels of Wolfe are brief mentions of O’Neill’s name as though American drama and O’Neill are inseparable. In Of Time and the River, volume 1, when Eugene Gant...