Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night is a dramatic play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill, widely considered to be his masterwork. It was first produced on Broadway and published in 1956, three years after its author's death. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1957.

Related Topics:
Eugene O'Neill - 1956 - Pulitzer Prize for Drama - 1957

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The action covers a fateful, heart-wrenching night at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones (the autobiographical representations of O'Neill himself, his brother, and their parents): James Tyrone Sr., an Irish-born retired actor who squandered his considerable gifts as a classical thespian to make a career playing one particular role in a commercially successful but artistically unfulfilling play; Edmund, the younger and more poetically inclined son, suffers from a respiratory condition and a deep disillusionment with the world around him after sailing the world as a deck hand; the elder son James Jr. ("Jamie"), an affable alcoholic and the object of stubborn repeated attempts by his father to be set up in business, despite his status as a confirmed ne'er-do-well; and the wife and mother of the family, Mary Cavan Tyrone, who lapses between self-delusion and the haze of her morphine addiction - the result of the shoddy ministrations of a quack doctor during her difficult labor and delivery of Edmund twenty-three years prior.

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O'Neill presented the manuscript of the play to his wife Carlotta on their twelfth wedding anniversary in 1941, with a dedication that read, in part:

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I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enable me to face my dead at last and write this play ­ write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.

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