"My own memory of O'Neill is that he was good-looking, very nervous, extremely impatient with 47, and anxious to get down to live in Greenwich Village... The first [of two plays O'Neill wrote during the year] was inconspicuous, and the latter was labored and stiff. His worst fault, I think, was an ineptitude at dialogue, except when the speakers were raving drunk or profane.

"He was friendly, though rather uneasy and inarticulate at times. You got the impression that he trembled a little, and seemed trying to keep from stuttering. But when he delivered himself of a remark, it was impressive . . . I always thought him very likeable."

One classmate called him "foulmouthed," and another referred to him as that "sarcastic bastard." (O'Neill in later years, used to tell of his habit of blaspheming like a sailor, simply to annoy a number of fastidious youths of the class who were easily shocked.)

Translated Nietzsche

He had other interests. With the help of a German scholar, he translated all of a Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, and his favorite authors changed to Nietzsche, Kropotkin, and Marx.

What did O'Neill get out of Professor Baker's course? "Well," he told Barret Clark, "not much out of the actual class-work itself. Necessarily, most of what Baker had to teach the beginners about the theatre as a physical medium was old stuff to me. Though on one occasion Baker told me he didn't think Bound East for Cardiff (written before I entered the class) was a play at all, I respected his judgement. The plays I wrote for him were rotten... Yes, I did get a great deal from Baker--personally. He encourage me--made me feel it was worth while going ahead."

Baker himself, in a letter in 1926, demonstrated his respect for O'Neill. "When O'Neill was working for me, he showed by the end of the year that he already knew how to write well in the one-act form, but he could not as yet manage the larger forms.

"I was very eager that he should return for a second year of work in these longer forms, but did not know till later that, though equally eager, his means at the moment made this impossible.

"O'Neill, when with me, worked steadily and with increasing effectiveness. He seemed absorbedly interested in what he was trying to do. Because of his wider experience of life, he seemed a good deal older than most of the men in the course, although not really so in years.

"He seemed a little aloof, though I never found him so personally. This, I think, came quite as much from a certain awe of him in his fellow-students because of his wider experience, as from any holding apart by him....

"After all these years my pleasant memory of O'Neill in the work is far more vivid than the memory of the details of that work."

O'Neill went from Harvard to Greenwich Village.

It was Baker's personality, not the mechanics of the class-work, that influenced the young playwright. The exact nature of this influence is never defined, but merely referred to as there; it kept the student going. Baker was a sympathetic audience, a somewhat limited educational role.

Comparison with Wolfe

This role, however, gains added significance when O'Neill's year at Harvard, 1914, is compared with the year of another writer: Thomas Wolfe, 1921.