this favorable impression is her extreme nervousness, expressed by continually fluttering hands so spoiled by rheumatism that they “have an ugly, crippled look.” O’Neill stresses her “shy convent-girl youthfulness . . . an innate worldly innocence.”

James Tyrone, eleven years Mary’s senior but belying his age by ten, is handsome, healthy, soldierly erect. In contrast to his wife, “he has no nerves.” His stolid Irish peasant heritage has kept him fit, but also keeps him from fully understanding the complex natures of his wife and sons. The latter soon join their parents. The elder, Jamie, resembles his father physically but lacks Tyrone’s grace and stamina. He shows “signs of premature disintegration,” while his cynical sneering “gives his countenance a Mephistophelian cast.” Twenty-three-year-old Edmund is his mother’s son, with luminous eyes in a hypersensitive face. The author notes, “It is in the quality of extreme nervous sensibility that the likeness of Edmund to his mother is most marked.”

These four tormented persons form a closely symbiotic quartet. Each important attribute of one affects—usually for the worse—the behavior of the other three. Each is both innocent victim and culpable victimizer; each takes turns occupying one angle of a dramatic triangle, playing not only the victim, but also the persecutor and rescuer. In act 1, as in this plays’ humorous counterpart, Ah, Wilderness! (pr., pb. 1933), O’Neill refers to actual landmarks, people, and events belonging to New London’s history, such as anecdotes regarding the pond of a Standard Oil millionaire and the pigs of Tyrone’s tenant farmer. The play is overtly autobiographical, with the playwright saluting his third wife, Carlotta, in his somber preface, for her “love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and forgiveness of all the four haunted Tyrones.” The O’Neills have become the Tyrones, with Eugene making the significant change by calling his alter ego Edmund—the name given the second O’Neill son, who died in infancy when exposed to measles by the oldest.

Two events propel most of the action: Mary Tyrone, despite having recently been treated for drug addiction, relapses into her morphine habit just as her husband and sons dared hope that she was permanently cured; and Edmund learns (as the playwright also did, in 1912) that he has tuberculosis—called “consumption” by the Tyrones—and must enter a sanatorium. During act 1, Tyrone berates Jamie for having encouraged Edmund to ruin his health by drinking and womanizing; then Jamie lashes back at his father, accusing him of miserliness for hiring a cut-rate quack doctor to deliver Edmund, since it was this physician who introduced Mary to morphine to ease her labor pains. Mary ends the act by evading their reproaches, then sinks into an armchair when alone, desperately drumming her fingers as she tries to resist her irrepressible longing for narcosis.

Act 2 opens at roughly 12:45 p.m. The brothers seek to escape confronting their mother’s downslide by drinking, but Mary’s withdrawn manner when she reappears confirms their worst fears. Mary denies their accusations by taking the offensive, charging her husband with unwillingness to make a proper home for his family. She blasts at Tyrone: “You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels. . . . Then nothing would ever have happened,” Tyrone loses all hope: “He suddenly looks a tired, bitterly sad old man.” In the act’s second scene, half an hour later, a telephone call from the family physician confirms Edmund’s tuberculosis. Mary deals with this hard news by reliving the trauma of Edmund’s birth. Alone with Edmund, she refuses to accept his life-threatening illness, then confesses her helplessness to stop her drug habit.

Act 3 begins at 6:30 p.m., with the fog beginning to roll in. Mary’s mind is in an induced haze (or fog): “She has hidden deeper within herself and found refuge and reality in a dream,” and that dream reverts her to her happy schoolgirl years in the convent. She increases her morphine dosage; her eyes grow more feverish, her manner becomes increasingly effusive. With Tyrone, she alternates reproaches for his pettiness, alcoholism, and rootlessness with assurances that she loves and forgives him. Edmund seeks her loving concern in his sickness—“Don’t you care a damn?”—but she is too sick herself to support him. As she leaves her family to resort to morphine again, Tyrone ends act 3, as he did act 2, “a sad, bewildered, broken old man.”

In act 4 it is midnight. Tyrone has become still sadder and more defeated, drunk by now and playing solitaire. Edmund soon enters, equally soused, and classifies himself in a lengthy confession as one of life’s fog-bound people, taking refuge in its shroud from an accursed life: “The fog was where I wanted to be . . . to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.” This act becomes a series of searing confrontations as the three male Tyrones takes turns articulating their resentments, only to offer them up on the altar of reconciliation. After Edmund has denounced his father for his niggardliness, particularly his unwillingness to send his son to a first-rate hospital for tubercular treatment, Tyrone pathetically admits to the self-betrayal he feels at the waste of his career: Forced to work from the age of ten by his father’s desertion, James Tyrone forfeited his potential as a great actor (confirmed by Edwin Booth) for the assured security of a money-making, mediocre melodrama—an obvious reference to an American production of Alexandre Dumas’ play, Monte-Christo (pr., pb. 1848), in which James O’Neill toured for a generation. “What the hell was it I wanted to buy,” Tyrone wonders. Edmund forgives his father; they forge a bond of mutual understanding.

Then Jamie stumbles in, after an evening of drink and sex at the local brothel. Tyrone goes out on the porch to avoid a confrontation, leaving the brothers to have theirs. In the play’s most profound psychological episode, the older brother confesses his ambivalent feelings toward the younger to him. Jamie describes how he romanticized his dissipations to entice Edmund to share them, because “The dead part of me . . . wants company, he doesn’t want to be the only corpse around the house!” Jamie also tells Edmund that he loves him more than he envies or hates him—loves him enough to hope that his younger brother will reject his nihilistic life-style and deny their kinship.

Suddenly Mary appears, providing the climax for this act as she did for the previous ones. She has her wedding gown over one arm, turns on all the parlor lights, and is so fully carried into her past that even her face seems youthful. Oblivious to the men’s presence, she reenacts her version of her piano-playing promise, her joyous preparation for nunhood in the convent. When Edmund cries out to and for her, she tells him not to touch her—her vocation is solely a religious one. She remembers next that her mother superior suggested that she should test her purpose by going home after graduation to live for a year or two like other young women before deciding whether she really wanted to become the bride of Christ. During that period, Mary recalls, “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” The listening men remain silent and stationary as the curtain descends.

O’Neill combines the retrospective techniques of Henrik Ibsen with the exorcistic intensity of August Strindberg. As in such Ibsen masterpieces as Ghosts (pb. 1881 as Gengangere), Rosmersholm (pb. 1886), and The Master Builder (pb. 1892 as Bygmester Solness), he minimizes the physical action: Properties are few, the setting is simple, suspense is absent, and dialogue is all-important as the characters exhume and examine their past, continually rocking it backward and forward. To quote Mary once more: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”

The play begins with sunshine streaming through the windows, but by lunch time, in act 2, the sun has turned to “faint haziness,” which becomes increasingly dense in the early afternoon, with the fog rolling in by the beginning of act 3 and becoming a wall by act 4. The fog becomes the play’s pervasive leitmotif: Its gradual thickening is an obvious reflection of the increasingly befogged mental state of the Tyrone household. It is a profound, eerily enveloping backdrop for the Tyrones’ various tragedies; its ominous ally, the foghorn, loneliest and most mournful of man-made sounds, broods portentously over the family like a herald of doom. Early in act 1, Mary mentions her inability to sleep well the previous night, with “that awful foghorn going all night long.” Her husband compares it to a “sick whale,” but Mary reminds him that he snored so hard, “I couldn’t tell which was the foghorn!” Act 3’s stage directions mention regularly sounded foghorns, “moaning like a mournful whale in labor.” Mary detests it: “It won’t let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back.” O’Neill seems to be using the foghorn as a manifestation of Mary’s conscience and sense of guilt for having isolated herself from the needs of her family, refusing to bear her maternal and spousal responsibilities.

For the same reasons, Mary loves the fog: “It hides you from the world and the world from you. . . . No one can find or touch you any more.” For Edmund, his whole life is a lonely, self-hating stumble through a blinding fog. Like his mother, he finds night and fog protective masks from the unbearable horror of existence. Complimented by his father for his eloquence in voicing his despair, Edmund replies, “Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people,” Essentially, O’Neill has both Mary and Edmund equate fog with not only the evasion of truth and self-awareness, but with death itself.

O’Neill’s use of liquor and morphine to effect the removal of his characters’ defenses and disguises is evident. His use of interior lighting, though, deserves notice. At the center of the Tyrones’ living room is a table with a green-shaded reading lamp. It is the only light in the room, illuminating Tyrone’s isolation as he sits close to it, alone, playing solitaire as the final act begins. When Edmund returns home and hurts his knee in the unlit hall, Tyrone’s penuriousness is shown to cause physical suffering, paralleling his preference for a cheap, state-run sanatorium where Edmund’s tuberculosis might be so poorly treated as to result in his death. In an attempt to conquer his miserliness and break through to Edmund, Tyrone turns on the three bulbs in the chandelier as he confesses to his son that he has warped his acting talent for money. Then, fearing Edmund’s contempt, he reverts to habit and turns off the “extra” lights. The darkness is shockingly dispelled by Mary, who begins her final, surrealistic entry by switching on all five bulbs of the front parlor’s chandelier, then playing a Chopin waltz despite her arthritis-stiffened fingers. This is a coup de theatre: The long day’s journey into the night of dreams and loss of self and death turns out, ironically, to be a journey into shining lights while Mary’s mournful last speeches expose this family’s soul-shaking woes.

*New London

*New London. Connecticut town that was both the boyhood and young-adult home of Eugene O’Neill, who employs it as the setting of this markedly autobiographical drama. The family’s summer home is modestly furnished with items of lesser value than one would expect for a wealthy, successful actor. His modest rooms are also dimly lit in the night scenes, because Mr. Tyrone wishes to save money on the electric bill.

One feature of this house that plays a prominent, almost haunting role in each scene is the spare room upstairs. There it is that Mrs. Tyrone withdraws from the rest of the family to give herself shots of morphine, to which she is addicted. An eerie aura also surrounds this house because of the dense fog, which rolls in from Long Island Sound and enshrouds it.

Another aspect of New London and the Tyrone family’s interaction with its citizens is important to the meaning of the play. The family is not the social equal of the prominent families in this ocean-side city. Mr. Tyrone has made his fortune by acting, a profession of some disrepute in his day. The addictions which afflict his wife and two sons (morphine, alcohol, and dissolute lifestyles) further isolate the Tyrones from the more substantial and well-respected residents of New London. The social isolation of the Tyrones is mirrored symbolically in their fog-enshrouded house.

*Broadway

*Broadway. Great theater district of New York City in which Mr. Tyrone makes his fortune. It is also referred to disparagingly throughout the play as a place of frivolous adult playtime. It is a place where Jamie Tyrone, a reprobate in his father’s eyes, idles away his time drinking and womanizing.

*Hilltown Sanatorium

*Hilltown Sanatorium. Mentioned in the last act of the play as Edmund’s destination, where he goes for six months to cure his tuberculosis. It is a climactic point in the drama when it is revealed that Edmund’s father is sending him to a state-run facility usually reserved for charity cases. Mr. Tyrone, ever fearful of poverty, will even sacrifice his young son to possible death at an ill-equipped sanatorium rather than pay for a more expensive, private facility.

While Hilltown is a fictitious name, it was based on an actual Connecticut public sanatorium. This real place was a wood-frame farmhouse in an isolated, hilly town about ten miles west of New Haven, in which terminal tubercular patients were housed. The sanatorium itself was named “Laurel Heights.” O’Neill actually stayed there for less than forty-eight hours, while the physician in charge contacted the playwright’s father and forced him to transfer O’Neill to a more appropriate, private sanatorium.

There are two significant time periods related to Long Day's Journey into Night. The play was written between 1939 and 1941, but it is set in 1912, a pivotal time in the author's life that mirrors the experiences of his fictional character, Edmund Tyrone.

Public Events
Notable events from the outside world do not infiltrate the Tyrone family conversations. For instance, there is no mention of the Titanic sinking in April 1912, which claimed over fifteen hundred lives and was the greatest maritime disaster of the era. Similarly, there is no reference to Captain Robert Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole, which culminated in March 1912 with the heroic deaths of Scott and his remaining team as they strove to reach safety and supplies.

O'Neill's unwavering focus on the Tyrone family's issues eliminates the need for references to such significant contemporary events. Their absence is striking and contributes to the play's claustrophobic atmosphere. Awareness of the outside world is reflected not through events but through the Tyrones' social consciousness. They feel marginalized, not fully accepted by the "Yanks" due to Tyrone's poor, shanty-Irish, Roman Catholic background.

For the audience, there is a hint of America's burgeoning love affair with the automobile, made possible by Henry Ford's introduction of the Model T in 1908. By 1913, Ford's company sold the model for $500, making it affordable for most middle-class families. Tyrone, stuck in the past, dislikes the second-hand car he bought for Mary and prefers the trolley and walking. Only Mary uses the car, driven by a paid chauffeur, much to Tyrone's frugal annoyance. Clearly, the world is moving past Tyrone, just as it seemed to be moving past O'Neill's father in real life.

A Battle of the Books
The Tyrone living room houses two bookcases. The first, small and unadorned, contains works by modern writers favored by Edmund and Jamie: novels by Balzac, Zola, and Stendhal; plays by Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg; poetry by Rossetti, Wilde, Dowson, and Kipling; and philosophical works by Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, and Schopenhauer. The second, larger, glass-fronted bookcase holds older works, including three sets of Shakespeare, romantic fiction by Dumas and Victor Hugo, fifty volumes of the world's greatest literature, major historical works, and various old plays, poetry collections, and Irish histories. This second, more distinguished-looking bookcase contains the preferred readings of James Tyrone, Sr. The only common link is Shakespeare's picture above the plainer bookcase, indicating that he holds a place of honor even in the sons' hearts.

The rift between Tyrone and his sons, deeply rooted in familial guilt and shame, has been exacerbated by their differing preferences in literature and philosophy. Throughout the play, literary references and quotations emerge as a recurring motif amid the emotionally charged cycles of accusations and counter-accusations. Edmund clearly favors realists and naturalists in fiction and drama, materialists and nihilists in philosophy, and fatalists and proponents of the art-for-art's-sake movement in poetry.

Tyrone finds Edmund's literary tastes abhorrent, viewing these writers as purveyors of nothing but gloom and despair. He dismisses them all as decadent, depressing, and godless. For Tyrone, Shakespeare stands supreme. He even theorizes that the real Shakespeare was not English but an Irish Catholic.

O'Neill's real father, much like Tyrone, belonged to the last generation of matinee idols, performing in a theater that admitted little that was new or unconventional. Typical offerings included rehashed Shakespeare and heroic melodrama, works that served as lucrative vehicles for popular actors like James O'Neill but kept the theater insulated from the real world. Eugene O'Neill, influenced by the writers found on Edmund's bookshelf, would change all that. By the 1920s, he would revolutionize American theater.

Substance Abuse: Morphine and Alcohol
By 1912, responsible physicians had ceased the indiscriminate use of morphine as a painkiller and treatment for depression. New laws required pharmacists to dispense it only by authorized prescription, ending its unrestricted availability. However, for many Americans like Mary Tyrone, the damage was already done. Morphine and laudanum, another opium derivative, had left thousands addicted, many of whom faced the social stigma and disgrace associated with drug addiction.

The excessive consumption of alcohol was more socially tolerated, particularly among men. By the end of the nineteenth century, the saloon had become an entrenched American institution. It functioned as a social club for working men, where they could drink, discuss the day's events, and gamble on cards and billiards. Some saloons also served as haunts for prostitutes, while others were outright bordellos; most, like their English pub counterparts, did not admit women.

Many saloon patrons, such as Jamie Tyrone, were problem drinkers and gamblers, often prone to violence, sexual promiscuity, or financial ruin. Their excesses fueled the temperance reform movement, led by a growing legion of women who sought to protect families from the dangers of "demon rum" and improve the nation's moral character and health. The movement achieved a legal victory in 1919 with the passage and ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment. However, this victory proved hollow. The prohibition of alcohol led to illegal bootlegging, homemade gin, and the rise of the infamous speakeasy, a Jazz Age replacement for the old saloon. Unlike the saloon, speakeasies were frequented by both men and the new generation of liberated "flappers," setting the stage for the bars and nightclubs that would legally operate once prohibition ended.

Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, referred to as "consumption" by the Tyrones, was a feared illness in 1912, taking nearly 100,000 American lives each year. Treatments were administered in specialized hospitals known as sanatoria and were largely experimental. Although doctors understood that a germ caused the disease, they had no definitive cure. Some attempted x-ray treatments, but the majority relied on extended rest, specific diets, and plenty of fresh air to alleviate symptoms. Edmund, upon discovering he has consumption, faces a recovery period in a sanatorium, much like O'Neill did in 1912.

The Great Depression
Prohibition ended in 1933, about six years before O'Neill began writing Long Day's Journey into Night. During the 1930s, America experienced a severe economic depression that had not fully subsided by the time O'Neill started the play. Although O'Neill sympathized with the working class, he focused on "private tragedy" rather than the social-conscience dramas like Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty (1935) and other works from the leftist Group Theatre. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, O'Neill's reputation declined in the 1930s.

World War II
World War II began in 1939 with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. Two years later, on December 7, 1941, the United States entered the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By that time, O'Neill had completed Long Day's Journey into Night. The war's impact and his deteriorating health almost halted his writing. In 1943, amidst the war, O'Neill and Carlotta destroyed the incomplete parts of his planned cycle of plays, realizing he would never finish them.

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill is a semi-autobiographical exploration of a family falling apart due to their struggles with drug addiction, serious illness, shame, and guilt.

Dramatic Unities
In the four acts of Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill adheres to the classical unities of time and place. The entire play is set in the living room of the Tyrone family's summer home in New London, Connecticut. The action transpires over a single day in August 1912, beginning in the early morning and concluding around midnight. Each scene and act represent segments of this single day, with the passage of time meticulously mirroring real life, unyielding and indifferent.

Symbolism
While maintaining the realistic framework of his drama, O'Neill employs symbolism effectively. The fog holds significant importance, initially serving as a natural element that enhances the mood. At the play's start, the previous night's fog has dissipated, reflecting the family's early morning optimism. However, by Act III during dinner, the fog returns, heralded by a foghorn "moaning like a mournful whale in labor." This reappearance aligns with the growing sense of despair and isolation among the characters, especially Mary, who wonders why the "fog makes everything sound so sad and lost."

On a deeper symbolic level, the fog represents more than just a natural phenomenon. For instance, Edmund uses it metaphorically during a moment of introspection. Confiding in his father, he expresses a desire to dissolve into the fog, to "be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself," and to become "a ghost belonging to the fog."

The fog also symbolizes forgetfulness, a place where reality becomes blurred and the world appears distorted. It represents Mary's drug-induced stupor and her retreat into an idealized past, offering her a temporary escape from her suffering.

Autobiographical Elements
The "haunted Tyrones" are dramatic representations of O'Neill's own family, with the play depicting a pivotal time in his life when he was about to enter a sanatorium for mild tuberculosis. Similar to James Tyrone, O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, was a renowned actor known for his role as Edmund Dantes in a stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo. O'Neill's mother, Ella Quinlan, like Mary, became addicted to morphine under likely similar circumstances. O'Neill's older brother, akin to Jamie, was an alcoholic and struggling actor who ultimately drank himself to death after Ella O'Neill's death from cancer. Many details in the play, including the New London setting and the Tyrone family history, are rooted in O'Neill's real life experiences.

Allusions
While the play doesn't heavily reference contemporary events, it frequently alludes to various writers and incorporates excerpts from poems and dramatic works into the dialogue. Although the living room furniture is sparse and worn, the two bookcases are packed with books by both historical and contemporary authors, specifically named by O'Neill in the stage directions and mentioned in the dialogue. Tyrone favors Shakespeare, often quoting him, whereas Edmund prefers more modern authors and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Dowson, Marx, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, whom his father considers gloomy, morally offensive, or anarchistic. Jamie, too, is well-read. In the final act, he quotes several lines from Swinburne's "A Leave Taking" in a choric counterpoint to Mary's sorrowful monologue.

There is also a notable allusion to the renowned American actor, Edwin Booth. Tyrone takes great pride in having once performed on stage with Booth, who admired Tyrone's talent. However, this memory is also painful for Tyrone, as he is haunted by the belief that he sacrificed his talent for easy money.

ForeshadowingLong Day's Journey into Night starts on a cheerful note. The day is bright, and the initial interactions between Tyrone and Mary are affectionate and playful. However, ominous hints of the play's tragic direction soon emerge. Mary's behavior suggests a relapse into morphine use. We learn she had a sleepless night and lacks appetite. She is visibly restless and appears slightly disoriented, even mildly hysterical. Her fluttering hands, obsessive concern with her hair, and inability to find her glasses—all these signs foreshadow her increasing loss of self-control.

MonologueLong Day's Journey into Night employs lengthy monologues in at least two significant ways: as reveries and confessions. Central to the play are Mary's reveries. As she sinks deeper into her drug-induced stupor, she rambles about the past, yearning to escape into it. At times, she seems incoherent, even babbling. In her final appearance, she launches into a long, disjointed monologue, almost entirely oblivious to the other characters' attempts to reach her. Edmund's extended poetic reflection on fog serves as both a confession and a reverie, as does Tyrone's monologue about his early theater days. Jamie's wandering monologue in the fourth act, where he begins by explaining why he stayed with Fat Violet and ends by admitting he has tried to corrupt Edmund, is almost pure confession.

Naturalism
Naturalism, which advocates a detached and clinical approach in literature, is renowned for its "slice of life" narratives. Such stories often lack a definitive conclusion, remaining open-ended and unresolved. Issues, like those in Long Day's Journey into Night, are left hanging, propelling the characters into an implied future that extends beyond the work's scope. Naturalistic literature also tends to be bleak, stripping away a character's dignity to reveal harsh truths buried deep within, often below their conscious awareness. This process is invariably painful and is a central theme in O'Neill's play.

Oedipus Complex
The Freudian influence on O'Neill is frequently noted, particularly his embrace of the Oedipal attachment of sons to their mothers and the accompanying sexual jealousy and hostility towards their fathers. While this may be a source of inner guilt for Edmund, the character who most clearly exhibits latent Oedipal guilt is Jamie. He seeks a surrogate mother figure among older prostitutes and displays a bitter jealousy towards Edmund, who is his main rival for Mary's affections, as described in Freud's Oedipal model.

1910s: World War I begins in the summer of 1914, with the United States joining the Allies against Germany in 1917.

1940s and 50s: O'Neill completes Long Day's Journey into Night before the United States enters World War II on December 7, 1941. The Cold War with the Soviet bloc erupts into open conflict in Korea, a "police action" that concludes with an armistice agreement on July 27, 1953, just four months before O'Neill's death. In 1956, the Soviet Union suppresses dissent in Poland and Hungary; that same year, Long Day's Journey into Night earns O'Neill a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Today: The 1990s see the end of the Cold War and the diminishing threat of a nuclear holocaust.

1910s: The airplane, automobile, and motion pictures, all in their early stages, begin to radically transform daily American life.

1940s and 50s: Films, which have included sound since 1928, become the most popular form of entertainment; commercial airlines increasingly replace trains for long-distance travel; and American homes start featuring double garages. By the 1950s, television becomes both popular and more affordable; jet engines become standard on commercial planes; and large, finned cars with powerful engines speed through America on an expanding network of highways and parkways.

Today: Houses without at least two televisions are increasingly rare; railroads continue to struggle to survive; and cars, while legally traveling faster on interstate highways, become smaller, more fuel-efficient, and more expensive.

1910s: America begins to reflect an awareness of foreign movements in art and literature, such as the French naturalists like Zola and Balzac, and the realistic drama of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov; O'Neill shows this foreign influence in his earliest plays.

1940s and 50s: American readers continue to be captivated by the fiction of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the plays of Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, and Robert Sherwood also have loyal audiences, but O'Neill's reputation remains static. By the 1950s, a new generation of postwar novelists and poets emerges, challenging Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost, and Eliot for space on bookstore shelves; the realistic problem play reaches its peak in the works of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and O'Neill, while avant-garde movements begin to stir in Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theaters.

Today: The field of fiction is highly competitive; in theater, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet continue to leave a lasting impact.

1910s: Through stricter federal laws regulating drug use and the militant efforts of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, America aims to end drug addiction and alcohol abuse; achieving Prohibition with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.

1940s and 50s: Following the repeal of prohibition in 1933, America resumed alcohol consumption, leading to a new post-World War II issue: drunk driving. Morphine remained a prevalent painkiller. The Beat Generation introduced "mind-expanding" drugs like marijuana to a broader audience, while middle-class Americans turned to tranquilizers to manage depression. Hard drugs began to afflict inner cities, and synthetic drugs such as methadone started to replace morphine in certain medical contexts.

Today: Drug abuse continues to be a significant problem. Crack cocaine and heroin severely impact inner cities, and marijuana use is widespread across America, particularly among the youth. Organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) have been influential in increasing penalties for driving under the influence, with some states now treating repeat offenses as felonies.

Long Day's Journey into Night was initially adapted into a film by Sidney Lumet. This adaptation featured Katharine Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell. This black and white film, titled Embassy (1962), is available from Republic Pictures Home Video.

In 1988, Jonathan Miller produced another adaptation of Long Day's Journey into Night as a made-for-television film. Using Sinclair Lewis's version of the play, it starred Peter Gallagher, Jack Lemmon, Bethel Leslie, and Kevin Spacey. This version is available from Lorimar Home Video/Vestron.

A third adaptation of the play was filmed at the Tom Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Directed by David Wellington, this version starred Peter Donaldson, Martha Henry, William Hutt, and Tom McCamus. Produced by the Stratford Festival in 1996, this adaptation is not currently available.

Further Reading

Hayes, Richard, "A Requiem for Mortality," Commonweal, Vol. 64, February 1, 1957, pp. 467-68. This review, although delayed, commends the Broadway production of Long Day's Journey into Night for its cast and its ability to achieve "tragic nobility" within a realistic setting.

McDonnell, Thomas P., "O'Neill's Drama of the Psyche," Catholic World, Vol. 197, April 1963, pp. 120-25. McDonnell posits that Long Day's Journey into Night represents O'Neill's pinnacle in his exploration of a tragedy rooted in his own troubled psyche.

Manheim, Michael, Eugene O'Neill's New Language of Kinship, Syracuse University Press, 1982. The introduction, the chapter on Long Day's Journey into Night, and the appendix on the play's motifs provide valuable insights for interpreting the work.

Pfister, Joel, "The Cultural Web in O'Neill's Journey," in Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse, University of North Carolina Press, 1995, pp. 203-15. Pfister draws parallels between Mary in Long Day's Journey into Night, Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Annie Keeney in O'Neill's earlier play, Ile.

Raleigh, John Henry, "O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and New England Irish-Catholicism," Partisan Review, Vol. 26, no. 4, Fall 1959, pp. 573-92. This background study connects the play's "dualism of religion-blasphemy" to Catholicism and Irish mythology.

Sources

Atkinson, Brooks, Review of Long Day's Journey into Night, New York Times, Vol. 47, November 8, 1956, p. 2.

Bogard, Travis, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Clurman, Harold, "The O'Neills," Nation, Vol. 182, March 3, 1956, pp. 182-83.

Falk, Dons V., Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays, Rutgers University Press, 1958.

Gibbs, Wolcott, "Doom," New Yorker, Vol. 32, November 24, 1956, pp. 120-21.

Hewes, Henry, "O'Neill: 100 Proof—Not a Blend," Saturday Review, Vol. 39, November 2, 1961, pp. 30-31.

Hewes, Henry, "O'Neill and Faulkner via the Abroad Way," Saturday Review, Vol. 39, October 20, 1956, p. 58.

Kerr, Walter, Review of Long Day's Journey into Night, in New York Herald-Tribune, November 8, 1956.

Raleigh, John Henry, The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, Southern Illinois University Press, 1965.

Rolo, Charles J., "The Trouble of One House," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 97, March 1956, pp. 84-85.

Seldes, Gilbert, "Long Day's Journey into Night," Saturday Review, Vol. 39, February 25, 1956, pp. 15-16.

Whicher, Stephen, "O'Neill's Long Journey," Commonweal, Vol. 63, March 16, 1956, pp. 614-15.