About the Sheaffer-O'Neill Collection

Louis Slung was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He spent one year as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, in the footsteps of his hero Thomas Wolfe, but soon moved north to New York where he worked in a succession of odd jobs before shipping out to sea for a trip to Seattle via the Panama Canal. From 1934 he worked as a newspaperman and drama critic for the Brooklyn Eagle until the demise of the newspaper in 1955, with a hiatus for service during World War II. Somewhere along the line he changed his surname from Slung to Sheaffer, which he amusingly called his “pen” name, referring to the famous fountain pen company. Finding himself unemployed and calling upon the experience and connections from his years as a drama critic, Sheaffer became the press agent for José Quintero’s production of The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square in 1956, which launched the revival of interest in the plays of Eugene O’Neill. He was also the press agent for the first New York production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, at the Helen Hayes Theatre, starring Fredric March, Florence Eldridge and Jason Robards, Jr. These events provided the galvanizing impetus for Sheaffer’s decision to write a biography of Eugene O’Neill.

When Louis Sheaffer began the research for his book about O’Neill and his work, the playwright had been dead for three years and many of the people who knew him were still alive. Sheaffer spent the next sixteen years of his life researching and writing the book. He later said that he researched for nine years before he ever wrote a line. Sheaffer’s research was exhaustive. For example, he spent nearly half a year examining every issue of the New London newspapers, the Telegraph and the Day, from the mid-1880s to the 1920s, roughly the period during which the O’Neill family lived or owned property in New London. In order to investigate O’Neill’s freshman year at Princeton in 1910, Sheaffer wrote to all 179 surviving members of his class to solicit their recollections nearly fifty years later.

Louis Sheaffer must have had an extraordinary ability to get people to talk. His research files include the records of interviews with and letters from hundreds of people who knew O’Neill personally or professionally, including many who had been very close to him. But Sheaffer recognized that even his two-volume work was not the last word on the subject since so much material was still closed to researchers during the period when he was writing his biography. Nevertheless, new information about the life of O’Neill has not substantially changed the portrait of the playwright that Sheaffer wrote in which he captured his subject with so much sympathy and insight. In that sense Sheaffer’s O’Neill remains the definitive biography.

The first volume, O’Neill, Son and Playwright, which takes the reader to 1920 and the New York premiere of Beyond the Horizon, was published in 1968 by Little, Brown & Company. It won the George Freedley Award from the Theater Library Association. The second volume, O’Neill, Son and Artist, was published in 1973 and was awarded the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for biography. During the period of his research, Sheaffer was supported by three Guggenheim Fellowships, grants-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, residencies at Yaddo and the McDowell Colony, as well as financial support from his parents and brother.

Louis Sheaffer lived modestly in his small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, working with extraordinary dedication and concentration for sixteen years on his biography of O’Neill. It is therefore not surprising that something went out of his life when he finished his project. Sheaffer later wrote about this period: