A “sort of composite backwoods-Bronx-bohunk-seaman jargon” Tennessee Williams’s Evolving Impressions of Eugene O’Neill

While it is safe to say that O’Neill and the Provincetown Players influenced the younger Williams, it would be wrong to assume that that imitation was always intended or even deferential. Williams had read nearly all of O’Neill’s one-act and full-length plays by 1936, and even saw one or more staged, but he unapologetically despised them for their transparent symbolism, their unpoetic dialogue and their theatrical tricks, criticism that he leveled in his early college writings on O’Neill. This essay looks at what the younger Williams had made of Eugene O’Neill, and by extension the Provincetown Players, over the course of his early career, and attempts to ascertain how Williams progressed from belittling O’Neill in 1936 as a “Barnum and Bailey”-like “showman” to later paying “Homage” to him in a portrait he painted of O’Neill in the 1970s.