Agnes Boulton

Agnes Boulton (September 19, 1893 – November 25, 1968) was a successful British-born American pulp fiction writer in the 1910s, later the wife of Eugene O'Neill.

Boulton was born in 1893 in London, England, the daughter of Cecil Maud (Williams) and Edward William Boulton, an artist. She grew up in Philadelphia and later in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey. She had married a Mr. Burton, who died prior to the meeting between O'Neill and Agnes Boulton; they had a daughter, Barbara.

Boulton met O'Neill in the fall of 1917 in the Golden Swan Saloon, better known as The Hell Hole, in Greenwich Village. They married some six months later, on April 12, 1918 at Provincetown, Massachusetts.

O'Neill, at the time, was considered a promising author of one-act plays. During the first year of their marriage, he wrote Beyond the Horizon, his first full-length, Broadway play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920. During the early years of the marriage, Boulton modified her writing and had two stories published by The Smart Set, an important magazine co-edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.

She gave birth to Shane O'Neill in 1919 and Oona O'Neill in 1925. The marriage came to an end when O'Neill left Boulton for the actress Carlotta Monterey in 1928, and they divorced in 1929. The Boulton/O'Neill marriage has been studied and written about by William Davies King, professor of theater at UC Santa Barbara, in "Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O'Neill and Agnes Boulton" (Michigan 2010).

Her daughter, Oona O'Neill, married Charlie Chaplin in 1943 at the age of 18 (he was 54), and moved to Switzerland with him nine years later, renouncing her American citizenship.

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