Life & Background
O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in 1888, the son of James O'Neill, a touring actor who had made a fortune playing the Count of Monte Cristo thousands of times and destroyed his talent doing it. His mother became addicted to morphine after his birth, and his elder brother drank himself to death — the family material of Long Day's Journey into Night. He was expelled from Princeton, went to sea, prospected for gold in Honduras, lived rough in New York waterfront bars, and attempted suicide at twenty-four. Tuberculosis in a sanatorium in 1912 turned him to reading drama and writing it. The Provincetown Players staged his early one-acts. He won four Pulitzers and the Nobel Prize in 1936. A degenerative tremor stopped him writing in the late 1940s, and he died in a Boston hotel in 1953.
Long Day's Journey into Night
One day in August 1912 in the Tyrones' summer house in Connecticut. James Tyrone, an ageing actor who made his money in a single melodrama, is miserly about everything, including doctors. His wife Mary has recently returned from treatment for morphine addiction, and over the course of the day the family watches her relapse, each of them pretending not to notice and then accusing the others. The elder son Jamie is a drunk who half-loves and half-sabotages his younger brother. Edmund, the writer, is diagnosed with tuberculosis, and his father tries to send him to a state sanatorium to save money. Through a long night of whiskey the men confess in turn: Tyrone that he sold his talent for a sure thing, Jamie that part of him wants his brother to fail. Mary appears at the end with her wedding gown, speaking as a girl in a convent.
The play is autobiographical to a degree almost without parallel — Edmund is O'Neill, Mary is his mother, the addiction and the tuberculosis and the miserliness are all documented — and he left instructions that it not be published until twenty-five years after his death, a wish his widow overrode. Its structure is naturalist in the strictest sense: one house, one day, a family driven by inheritance, chemistry, and money, with the fog outside as the play's only symbol and Mary saying explicitly that none of them can help what the past has made of them. The four confessions are staged as a descent, the light dimming through the acts, and the play's power comes from its refusal to let any character be simply guilty.
Why O'Neill Matters
O'Neill made American drama a serious literary form, importing Ibsen, Strindberg, and Greek tragic structure into a theatre that had been dominated by melodrama, and every American dramatist after him — Miller, Williams, Albee — works in the space he opened. He remains the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His formal range, from the expressionism of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape to the naturalism of the late plays, makes him a standard case in the development of modern dramatic form.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Beyond the Horizon1920
- The Emperor Jones1920
- Anna Christie1921
- The Hairy Ape1922
- Desire Under the Elms1924
- Mourning Becomes Electra1931
- The Iceman Cometh1946
- Long Day's Journey into Night1956