ALS: Friday, October 20, 1933

O'Neill was diagnosed as having tuberculosis late in 1912, and was admitted to Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut on Christmas Eve of that year. He had a relatively mild case, and remained at Gaylord under the care of Dr. David Lyman for just under six months. While at Gaylord, O'Neill wrote his first play, A WIFE FOR LIFE. In 1920, he told a reporter, "I just drifted along until I was twenty-four and then I got a jolt and sat up and took notice. Retribution overtook me and I went down with TB. It gave me time to think about myself and what I was doing -- or, rather, wasn't doing. I got busy writing one-act plays." One of O'Neill's early full-length plays, THE STRAW, is based on his stay at Gaylord.

Sea Island, Ga.
Oct. 20, 1933.

Dear Mr. Emerson:

I am quite willing to be a member of the National Christmas Seal Committee - provided you will stick my name down and let it go at that, without comment or reference to past history.

You see, I am in a peculiar situation in regard to this. My T.B. experience has been belabored and exaggerated to the n^th degree in biographies, newspapers and magazine articles -- and, candidly, I'm a bit fed up with references to it, especially when, as has happened, the profound psychological commentators try to read T.B. after-effects into the meaning of my plays, etc! It leads to such damned drivelling nonsense! Particularly since, as Doctor Lyman of Gaylord Farm could tell you, my contact with T.B. in 1912-13 was of the most incipient variety and vanished in five months without my hardly being aware I was sick. Yet even today, if I'm laid up for a few days with ___ or a cold or hives or what not, and the newspapers get hold of it, I begin at once to hear rumors I am again dying of T.B.! And this summer when I innocently rented a camp in the Adirondacks for a month, the connotation Adirondacks-T.B. started the dire reports going strong again!

It's amusing -- but also, I think you will admit, a bit hard on my family! And I explain so much to you because I want you to understand how I feel.

Faithfully yours,

Eugene O'Neill.