The Emperor Jones

The Emperor Jones is a 1920 tragic play by American dramatistEugene O'Neill about the final day in the rule of Emperor Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African American and a former Pullman porter, who is making his escape from his island kingdom while being haunted by ghosts of his past. Lost in the jungle, Brutus encounters phantoms recalling how he got here, including a black man he killed over a dice game, a violent escape from a prison chain gang, and a slave auction of his forebears.

Originally called The Silver Bullet, the play is one of O'Neill's major experimental works, mixing expressionism and realism, and the use of an unreliable narrator and multiple points of view. It was also an oblique commentary on the U.S. occupation of Haiti after bloody rebellions there, an act of imperialism that was much condemned in O'Neill's radical political circles in New York. The Emperor Jones draws on O'Neill's own hallucinatory experience hacking through the jungle while prospecting for gold in Honduras in 1909, as well as the brief, brutal presidency of Haiti's Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.

The Emperor Jones was O'Neill's first big box-office hit. It established him as a successful playwright, after he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his first play, the much less well-known Beyond the Horizon (1920). The Emperor Jones was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1920–1921.