Nobel-winning American playwright Eugene O'Neill appears to have inspired the Unabomber, the Associated Press reports.

The Unabomber, a deranged man who opposed the influence of technology on American life, sent package bombs during the 1980s and '90s to kill or injure those he felt promoted it.

The AP quoted a Richard Sacchetti, a former federal agent connected with the case, saying that the person who identified himself as "Unabom" put commemorative stamps bearing O'Neill's likeness on the packages meant to kill; and stamps with abolitionist Frederick Douglass and feminist Lucy Stone on those packages mean to injure.

"He definitely placed a lot of significance on (the O'Neill) stamp," the AP said, quoting an interview in the New London Day newspaper, which is published near the town where O'Neill spent his formative years. The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center is in nearby Waterford.

Unabom "was a well-read guy, a genius" the Sacchetti interview continues. "He would not have developed a pattern like this by accident. He placed a lot of symbolic value on the stamps." The story cited O'Neill's drama Dynamo, an indictment of the depersonalizing nature of industrialization, as echoing themes found in a manifesto written by Unabom and published in prominent U.S. newspapers.

Theodore Kaczynski has been charged with the bombings.

-- By Robert Viagas