Eugene O'Neill was involved in the New York social scene along with Dorothy Day.

I think it is important to understand the mood of the country in that there was a segment of descent. Dorothy Day was one of them along with Eugene O'Neill. Yet they follow different paths. Fierce friends, but, that touch of devotion to God delivered her differently in life.

America’s critics (click here) were obviously hard on Eugene O’Neill. His plays were innovative and successful, but they were godless. They depicted vivid acts of violence, murder, suicide, social evils and moments of dark despair. It was not until a 1946 review of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” that a reviewer at least praised Eugene O’Neill for his fierce honesty, his almost quixotic intellectual integrity. Indeed, the Catholic world, while Eugene O’Neill was alive and productive, rejected O’Neill in much the same way that O’Neill had earlier rejected his Catholic faith.

Sixty years ago, on Nov. 27, 1953, Eugene O’Neill died on the fourth floor of the Hotel Shelton in Boston. Boston University acquired the building in 1954, and it remains in use today as a dormitory for upperclassmen. In 1951 O’Neill had moved to the hotel with his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, from a cottage on the north shore of Massachusetts. O’Neill needed to be closer to his doctors. After nearly 10 years of suffering from a degenerative disease that resembled Parkinson’s, O’Neill died of pneumonia. He had stipulated that no one attend his funeral—certainly no man of God.

In their biography, Arthur and Barbara Gelb quote O’Neill telling his wife, “Get me quietly and simply buried…and don’t bring a priest. If there is a God and I meet Him, we’ll talk things over personally, man to man.” Carlotta succeeded in keeping the burial a secret. Only Carlotta, O’Neill’s nurse and his doctor attended the burial at a secluded plot in Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Nothing was said or sung. After a wreath was laid on the coffin, Carlotta turned and left the grave without shedding a tear. She would be buried next to her husband in 1970.... 

...Indeed, O’Neill was fiercely honest in his writing, and there is one play that resonated deeply with critics at America for its depiction of an honest search for God. It is a play that is rarely mentioned in academic criticism of O’Neill and is rarely reprinted.

“Days Without End” is a fascinating snapshot of O’Neill’s struggle with faith in the years 1932-34. Perhaps it fails to have the impact of his other plays because the ending—the main character’s return to faith after a terrible, decades-long crisis of faith—was ultimately disingenuous. The ending troubled O’Neill, and he later dismissed the play. It portrays the anguish of a young man who rejected his faith after his parents died. He spends his life searching for truth, embracing atheism, socialism and anarchism. Finally, he falls in love but fears his wife’s mortality....
The last ten years of Eugene O'Neill's life ended tragically to have lost his children to suicide, heroine addiction and a marriage he disapproved of when his daughter to Charlie Chaplin. O'Neill would have three wives with two divorces. He did not die alone, his third wife would inherit his estate at his death.