Eugene O’neill, George Bellows, and the Lincoln Arcade

abstract:O’Neill lived in the New York studio of Ashcan artist George Bellows for about nine months in 1908–9. Bread and Butter (1914) is ostensibly about an O’Neill-like hero, a painter, whose family destroys him because it fails to or refuses to understand him. The real hero, though, is the protagonist’s roommate, modeled after Bellows, whose eventual hard-earned success prompts the protagonist to commit suicide in despair. O’Neill dramatizes for the first time the tragedy of abandoned hopes and dreams, a subject and theme he pursues next with Beyond the Horizon, then The Great God Brown (1925), and finally Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941). His early vow to become “an artist or nothing” can be evaluated in terms of his relationship with Bellows, to whom he would compare and against whom he would compete throughout his career.