Eugene O’Neill: 

Under the Elms

Eugene O'Neill often seemed an unhappy man. But America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright may have been particularly unhappy in Ridgefield. He disliked the cold winters, perhaps felt the town was not close enough to the sea, and seemed to dislike what he considered a gloomy house. And he may even have imagined ghosts watching him here. 

What's more, his marriage was in the process of breaking up when he lived in town.

Nonetheless,  O'Neill used Brook Farm on North Salem Road and its environs as the inspiration for the setting of one of his best plays, “Desire Under the Elms,” and he wrote at least five other plays while here (“All God's Chillun Got Wings,” “Marco Millions,” “The Great God Brown,” “Lazarus Laughed,” and “Strange Interlude”). 

And when he was selling the place, he had doubts about abandoning its beauty.

A native of New York City, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in 1888, the son of an actor, and lived his first seven years mostly in hotels and on trains. He was expelled from Princeton, studied briefly at Harvard, and held many jobs — including a stint as a newspaper reporter. 

He began to write plays in 1913 and by 1920 he had won his first Pulitzer Prize for “Beyond the Horizon.”

O’Neill bought Brook Farm in 1922 and lived here with his second wife, Agnes, and son Shane. 

“His settling at Brook Farm realized an ambition never really achieved by his father — to own and live in a gracious homestead in which one’s children, and perhaps one's children's children, would grow up,” wrote Croswell Bowen in “The Curse of the Misbegotten.”   “Agnes would have preferred a smaller place, but O'Neill always insisted he must have a big house. He felt that at Brook Farm he could at last ‘belong.’”

Silvio Bedini, the Smithsonian historian, grew up nearby and, as a boy, played with Shane O’Neill, whom he found both lonely and spoiled. To Silvio and his brother Ferdinand Bedini, Eugene O'Neill was a stern, brooding, almost superhuman presence in and about the house. 

Indeed, the playwright suffered from loneliness, depression and alcoholism (biographer Bowen describes a famous binge in Brook Farm's cellar after O'Neill broke open a barrel of hard cider with poet Hart Crane and critic Malcolm Cowley. At one point, as the playwright poured pitchers of cider, poet Crane, waving a dead cigar, gave a recital as the equally drunk Crowley served as an audience).

O'Neill scholars and biographers say he was unhappy at the house, possibly because of the cold, perhaps because it was not near the sea. At one point, biographer Louis Sheaffer said, O'Neill believed “someone was peering over his shoulder as he wrote, and one night he thought he heard footsteps outside, going round and round the house.” 

Nonetheless, in the trees and the stone walls he found inspiration that he employed in “Desire Under the Elms.” 

In 1925, while he was living here, his daughter was born in Bermuda; when she was 18, Oona O'Neill married the much-older, comedian-director Charlie Chaplin, prompting an angry O’Neill to disown his daughter — they never saw each other again. Oona remained devoted to Chaplin until his death in 1977. She died in 1991. 

By 1926, O'Neill was using Brook Farm only occasionally, but in a letter to his wife written in September 1927 shortly before he sold the place, he wrote: “Going to Ridgefield made me sad. It's so beautiful right now, and I couldn't help feeling more keenly than ever that that's where our family ought to be. I have half a mind to open (the house) myself, except that it would be so lonely all by myself.” 

Soon after he divorced his wife and married actress Carlotta Monterey.

O'Neill went on to live in many other places here and abroad, win the Nobel Prize in 1936, and begin a long decline in health from a neurological disorder that ended in his death in 1953. 

But though his output had dwindled in his last 20 years, one of his most important works, the autobiographical “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” was completed near his death and published in 1956, earning his fourth Pulitzer Prize. The only other individual to win that many Pulitzers was poet Robert Frost.

Westbrook Pegler: 

Caustic Columnist

Westbrook Pegler, the caustic columnist who spent years attacking “Reds,” was one of a half dozen Ridgefielders whose writings have won a Pulitzer Prize. His award-winning words weren’t about communists, however, but about labor union racketeering.

Pegler lived here from 1941 to 1948 during which time he seemed better known locally for his attack on Ridgefield’s plumbing code and his efforts to collect bumpers than as a national newspaper columnist. Both these efforts occurred during World War II. 

While expanding his home on Old Stagecoach Road, Pegler wanted to use cheaper, unlicensed plumbers but the town code, modeled after the state’s and supported by unions, required the use of licensed plumbers. Pegler called it discriminatory and tried to get the Town Meeting to abandon the code. He failed. 

He was more successful in his campaign to get people to turn in their steel automobile bumpers to help the war effort – Life magazine featured a full-page picture of him removing his own bumper in front of the Ridgefield town hall. 

Francis James Westbrook Pegler was born in 1894 in Minneapolis, Minn., a son of a newspaper editor. By his early 20s, he was working for United Press and became the youngest American correspondent covering World War I. 

After the war he worked as a sports columnist for a while but, at the Chicago Tribune, soon turned to covering politics, labor, government, and other hard-news topics in a column he called “Mister Pegler.”  By the late 1930s, the column, handled by the Scripps Howard syndicate, was carried in more than 115 newspapers and had an estimated six million readers. He was making $65,000 a year — that’s about $1.1 million in today’s dollars.

Time magazine called him “the great dissenter for the common man,” adding that “Mister Pegler is invariably irritated, inexhaustibly scornful...Pegler applies himself to presidents and peanut vendors with equal zeal and skill. Dissension is his philosophy.”

Famous for his conservative, anti-Communist writings, he “used his typewriter like a meat ax,” said one critic. He criticized virtually every president, and took special aim at Franklin

Roosevelt, whom he called “Moosejaw.” (He called Eleanor  “La boca grande” — or “the big mouth.”)

“He depicted a world where a conspiracy of criminals, corrupt union officials, Communists, and their political allies in the New Deal threatened the economic freedom of working Americans,” wrote historian David Witwe in the Journal of Social History in 2003.

Pegler probably reached his peak of popularity and power in the early 1940s when he helped expose a New York City racketeer named George Scalise, a union boss who happened to own a home in Ridgefield — what is now the St. Ignatius retreat house on Tackora Trail. An associate of mobster Dutch Schultz, Scalise was arrested in 1940 by the crusading district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and almost-president, and was charged with extorting $100,000 ($1.7 million today) from hotels and contracting firms. But the arrest came only after Pegler had exposed Scalise in a series of anti-racketeering columns that won him the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1941. It was the same year he came in third in the voting for Time magazine’s Man of the Year, behind two of his most hated targets, President Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin.

In a 1940 piece, Pegler described how Scalise had used union funds to acquire the 27-room mansion on Tackora Trail. (He also noted that just across North Salem Road was the town poor house.)

His research on Scalise probably introduced him to Ridgefield, and in 1941, he bought the 100-acre farm on Old Stagecoach Road.   

He eventually soured on the town, however. In a 1950 column, two years after he moved to Arizona, he described Ridgefield as “an old aristocratic town of moldering white mansions on a white main street” that “has quietly become infested with wealthy Sixth Columnists” (supporters of communism).

When he was in his glory years, three books of Pegler’s columns were published: “T’ain’t Right” in 1936; “The Dissenting Opinions of Mister Westbrook Pegler” in 1938; and “George Spelvin, American, and Fireside Chats” in 1942.

By the mid-1950s Pegler fell out of favor, and his columns appeared only in the magazine of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. 

He died in 1969 in Arizona at the age of 74. 

Robert Lewis Taylor: 

Pulitzer-winning author

Robert Lewis Taylor was one of a half-dozen Pulitzer Prize-winning authors to have lived in Ridgefield, but it was his ability to profile celebrities for The New Yorker that first earned him a reputation in the world of literate writing.

Taylor won the Pulitzer for “The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters,” a 1959 novel about a 14-year-old boy and his father who trekked across the West during the Gold Rush. It was one of his first novels.

The Illinois native was born in 1912 and graduated from the University of Illinois in 1933. He began his writing career as a reporter for The Carbondale (Ill.) Herald, leaving after a year to hop a steamer to Tahiti, where he stayed until he ran out of money and returned to the U.S.

When he applied for a job at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “the editor asked me if I was a journalism school graduate — I wasn’t — and I briefly considered lying about it, but my better nature prevailed and I admitted that my degree was in humanities,” he told an interviewer in 1978. “Thank God,” replied the editor, “If you had been, I wouldn’t hire you because it would take us too long to unlearn all the nonsense those schools stuff into their students.”

By 1939, he was on the staff of The New Yorker, where he was noted for his witty profiles of such characters as conductor Artie Shaw, muscleman Charles Atlas, and even the then-famous circus ape Gargantua. He had a reputation for highlighting characteristics that gave a precise and graphic look at a person. For example, in a piece on Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail, Taylor wrote: “His habitual expression seems to be a silent appeal for Bromo Seltzer.”

A reviewer characterized a collection of his New Yorker pieces as showing “an alert but tolerant inquisitiveness, a large amount of understanding and decency, and the warm and irresistible humor of a born raconteur.”

After the war, he returned to the New Yorker, wrote for other magazines and began producing books, both novels and biographies. His biography of W.C. Fields and Winston Churchill were well-reviewed. In all he wrote nearly a dozen books.

When “The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters” appeared, The New York Times reviewer said “about a year’s supply of exciting episodes for a weekly television show like Wagon Train could be taken from this novel, a top-quality tale of the trail to California’s gold fields and grassy valleys in 1849.” The book, in fact, inspired a 1960 television series of the same name that starred a nine-year-old Kurt Russell.

“A Journey to Matecumbe,” a novel set in the South after the Civil War, became the 1976 Disney movie, “The Treasure of Matecumbe.” 

Taylor lived on Old Branchville Road in the 1950s and 60s, later moved to Sharen, then Kent, and finally Southbury where he died in 1998 at the age of 88.

He served as a Navy lieutenant commander during World War II, observing later, “I enjoyed the Navy. I think the best thing to come out of the war was the camaraderie among the men — no doubt, a uniformity of misery.” However, he was glad that his son Martin did not have to serve in the Vietnam War. “I hate our senseless wars and the politicians who get us into them,” he said. “If I had my way, politicians would be against the law.”