Eugene O'Neill

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Air takes four, with three each in fire and water, and five of the ten are mutable. The chart holds one yod, made of the Moon, Saturn and Uranus. The record calls O'Neill the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize and the one who brought tragedy into the American theatre, and says Long Day's Journey into Night was published after his death, as he had asked.

The Moon is in three of the six closest contacts here and all three are about home. It stands at an awkward angle to Uranus at a fifth of a degree, security and freedom fighting: an unstable early home, difficulty staying anywhere, and leaving before being left. It sits at the same angle to Saturn at seven tenths, need meeting refusal: loneliness, and difficulty asking for anything. And it sits in easy contact with Mercury at nine tenths, feelings that articulate easily. Three of the six closest contacts running to one planet is unusual, and in a playwright the Moon is the planet a reader would have picked.

A chart whose busiest planet is the Moon, and whose Moon readings are all about an unsettled home, in a playwright who left instructions that one play was not to be published until he was dead, is a resonance a reader will reach for at once. The record does not say what that play is about and this entry will not guess. What it does say is that the instruction existed, and the third of those three contacts, feelings that articulate easily, is the one with a trade in it: putting a feeling into speech is what a playwright does for a living.

No earth at all, with five mutable planets, is the balance here: a chart that adjusts constantly and builds very little, in somebody whose output is a shelf of plays, which is an inverse rather than a fit. Saturn sits sixty degrees from Uranus at half a degree, practical innovation, and that pair closes the yod on the Moon. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. He died at Boston on 27 November 1953, at sixty five. Two contacts landed on his natal Mars inside three hundredths of a degree that day, Neptune sixty degrees from it at two hundredths and Pluto in easy contact with it at three, which is two slow planets arriving on one point at once. The Moon was disseminating and fifty six per cent lit.