Eugene O’Neill won Nobel Prize in Literature as Playwright of Multiple Personality

He won the Nobel Prize in 1936, having written his two plays that were most overtly about multiple personality, The Great God Brown, in 1926, and Days Without End in 1933.

The Great God Brown was a commercial success, but Days Without End was a flop. And O’Neill had such a deep emotional investment in Days Without End, and felt so bad after its poor reception, that he did not put another play on the stage for more than a decade.

Days Without End is one of O’Neill’s two most autobiographical plays. Other than his hurt feelings after it flopped, my reason for saying this is outrageously superficial. Out of his more than fifty plays, the only two that have the word “days” or “day’s” in the title are Days Without End and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the latter generally considered his most autobiographical play. The titles are almost the same, except that one was written in the prime of life, for immediate publication, while the other was written toward the end of life and published posthumously.

Obviously, the two plays are not autobiographical in the same sense. Long Day’s Journey is factually autobiographical. And if Days Without End is autobiographical, it is so psychologically.

The title of the multiple personality play, Days Without End, suggests timelessness, since multiple personality, especially in regard to its child-aged alternate personalities, has a timeless quality. As discussed previously in regard to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, child-aged alters never grow up. They are frozen in time. They experience life as days without end.