Agnes Boulton

Agnes Ruby Boulton (September 19, 1893 – November 25, 1968) was a British-born American pulp magazine writer in the 1910s, later the wife of Eugene O'Neill. Life and career 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 gave birth to a daughter, Barbara Burton, in 1914; she claimed to have married a man named Burton who later died, but later admitted that this was a falsehood. 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.