Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day’s Journey into Night was a personal project for Eugene O’Neill, and he did not want it to be published or performed during his lifetime. The play itself is autobiographical in the sense that Edmund is O’Neill, who had a brother, James Jr., a father, James, and a mother, Mary Ellen, who are accurately captured in the characters of Jamie, Tyrone, and Mary, with only the last name changed from O’Neill to Tyrone, based on James’s Irish heritage. The child that passed away, Eugene, was Edmund in real life, with O’Neill being the third child of James and Mary. O’Neill did not want the play published until 25 years after his death, but his wife, Carlotta, had it published early in 1956 to fund the Eugene O’Neill Collection at Yale University in New Haven, CT. The play follows O’Neill’s real family, as O’Neill himself went to Princeton University for a year before traveling, as Edmund has in the play, while James, O’Neill’s father, was a successful actor who worked alongside Edwin Booth, as did Tyrone. O’Neill’s brother, Jamie, or James Jr., did have an alcohol addiction and died from alcohol-related complications in the early 1920s, along with James and Mary.