THE HAIRY APE

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Checkov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest American plays in the 20th century, along side Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desired and Arthur Miller's Death of salesman.

     The Hairy Ape is an expressionist  play by Eugene O'Neill  about  a brutish, unthinking 

laborer known as Yank as he  searches   for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by

the rich. At first Yank feels secure as he stokes the engines of an oceanliner, and is highly 

confident in his physical power over the ship's engines. However, when the weak, but rich 

daugther of an  industrial  in  the  steel busines refers to him as a fiilthy beast, Yank under

goes a crisis of identity.  He leaves  the  ship  and wanders into Manhattan only to find he

does not belong to anywhere either with the  socialites  on  fifth  avenue, or with the labor 

organizers on the waterfront.  The  hairy  ape is  effect of indistrualizion and technological 

progress.

    

                                                                                                          MARY Q.