Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill
Summary
The entire play takes place across one day in August 1912 inside the Tyrone family's Connecticut summer house, and Eugene O'Neill spends that single day dismantling every comfortable illusion the family tells itself by morning. James Tyrone, a once promising classical actor who spent his career playing the same lucrative role, in The Count of Monte Cristo, roughly six thousand times rather than risk real artistic ambition, presides over a household his own stinginess has quietly damaged for decades. His wife Mary has just returned from a sanatorium, supposedly cured of the morphine addiction that began with a doctor's careless prescription after a difficult childbirth years earlier, and the family spends the day watching for the small signs, her hands, her voice, her sudden vagueness, that tell them, well before she admits it herself, that she has relapsed again. Their elder son Jamie drinks steadily and picks at his own failures and his brother's health with a cruelty that only partly disguises real love, while the younger son Edmund, a stand in for O'Neill himself, gets his tuberculosis diagnosis confirmed during the same day the family is already struggling to hold together.
By nightfall every character has said things that cannot be unsaid, accusations of stinginess, of failure, of blame for Mary's addiction traded back and forth with real precision about exactly where each wound came from. The play ends with Mary, fully lost now to the drug and to memory, descending the stairs in her old wedding dress, talking not to her family but to a version of her own younger self from before any of this happened, while the three Tyrone men sit in silence, unable to reach her and unable to leave.
O'Neill wrote the play between 1939 and 1941, drawing directly on his own family, and asked that it not be published until twenty five years after his death, leaving the manuscript sealed with his publisher. Reading or watching it means sitting inside a family that keeps wounding each other and still, visibly, cannot stop loving each other either, which is where its considerable, difficult power comes from.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Eugene O'Neill the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature for the power, honesty and deep felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy, an honor that made him the second American to win the literature prize, six years after Sinclair Lewis, and still the only American playwright to win it. Long Day's Journey into Night did not exist as a public work at the time; O'Neill wrote it years afterward, between 1939 and 1941, and explicitly forbade its publication during his lifetime, leaving the manuscript sealed with his publisher under instructions that it wait twenty five years past his death.
His widow, Carlotta Monterey, overruled those instructions almost immediately after O'Neill died in 1953, and the play premiered in Sweden in February 1956 before opening on Broadway that November, just three years after his death rather than twenty five. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama posthumously in 1957 and is now the work most commonly cited as the reason behind his own Nobel citation, even though it did not exist when the Academy wrote it.