Read The Hairy Ape in full
The complete text of The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill on booknest — 8 chapters, free to read, with notes and narration.
Yank, a massively built stoker in the furnace room of an ocean liner, believes that his strength makes the ship and the modern world move. That certainty collapses when Mildred, the daughter of a steel magnate, sees him and recoils from him as a filthy beast. Ashore, Yank searches for an enemy and somewhere to belong, but Fifth Avenue society ignores him, prison cages him like an animal, and a radical labour organization suspects him of being a spy. At last he approaches a zoo gorilla as a brother; its embrace crushes him, and Yank dies inside the cage of the creature society has used to define him.