Famous Last Words

While reading Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog, I came across a mention of Eugene O'Neill's last words as he lay dying in the Shelton Hotel. The crabby part of me really wants to go out bitching in a similar fashion. I don't know whether or not his intention was humor, but his parting words made me laugh. (It helps to imagine them voiced by George Costanza.)

Eugene O'Neill, who wrote The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day's Journey into Night, was 65 when he died, broke and unhappy, in Suite 401 of the Shelton Hotel in Boston on November 27, 1953. His last words were: ''I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room -- and goddamn it -- died in a hotel room.'' He had been born in a Broadway hotel room in New York, the son of an Irish-American actor.