Quotidian Matters: Reading the Diary of Eugene O’Neill

Much attention has been given to the fact that O’Neill unusually involved the material of his life in the composition of his plays, but little has gone to the various diaries he kept on a daily basis through two decades of his career. Biographers and literary historians have used them to establish particular facts and for the self-reflective comments he made now and then, but this essay looks at them as peculiarly self-expressive documents of private experience, especially when read in conjunction with the problematic diaries kept by the women to whom he was married through that period of his life—Agnes Boulton and Carlotta Monterey.