Marco Millions

by Eugene O'Neill

1927. Generally agreed to be one of the most significant forces in the history of the American theater, O'Neill is a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. O'Neill writes in the foreword that Marco Millions is an attempt to render poetic justice to one long famous as a traveler, unjustly world-renowned as a liar, but sadly unrecognized by posterity in his true eminence as a man and a citizen-Marco Polo of Venice. The failure to appraise Polo at a fair valuation is his own fault...Even in his native Venice, he was scoffingly nicknamed the millionaire or Marco Millions...This has moved me to an indignant crusade between the lines of this book, the bars of his prison, in order to whitewash the good soul of that maligned Venetian. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Genres: Plays

Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956.

He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches.

His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! , his only comedy: all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poetic satire on the West’s arrogant materialism: “He has lusted for everything and loved nothing.”

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has to be by far the most atypical play O'Neill wrote, though he did write a lot of diverse one-acts before his major plays. No drunken patriarchs or uppity sons or fighting about money/land/whiskey. Instead we have a Rotarian Marco Polo fresh from learning his Mason handshake teaching Kublai Khan about his evil Western Ways.

O'Neill does re-use one character type that he has used before (Anna Christie), the doomed but honorable woman. In "Marco Millions" it is the grand-daughter of the Khan (or Kaan) who falls in love with the oblivious Polo. O'Neill does a remarkable job in illuminating unrequited love and how much it hurts the unrequitee while the unrequiter is not even touched. As the venerable Wikipedia informs us, 98% of us have suffered this. Marco instead is in love with his millions and his childhood girl - who is little more than just an idea as he's in China for most of his life.

As the boat takes the Khan's grand-daughter to her arranged marriage in Persia and Marco takes her (for the bounty, not her company) we can imagine that she keeps pleading "Marco, Marco ...." across the water but there is no one to reply "Polo, Polo..."