The Neurologic Illness of Eugene O'Neill — A Clinicopathological Report

Eugene O'Neill, the only native-born American playwright awarded a Nobel prize for literature, winner of four Pulitzer prizes, and widely regarded as the nation's first and most distinguished dramatist, suffered from an ultimately lethal neurodegenerative disease during the last 12 years of his life. Yet existing biographies of O'Neill have displayed considerable uncertainty about the details of this disease and its crippling impact on his life and art.1,2 After his death on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65 — and reflecting the desire of his wife, Carlotta, to identify the fatal disease “because I wanted to know . . .