Long Day’s Journey into Night (Author Biography)

Author Biography

It was because Long Day’s Journey into Night was so transparently autobiographical that Eugene O’Neill forbade the play’s production and publication during his lifetime. The main characters are thinly veiled portraits of his father, James, his mother, Ella, his brother, Jamie, and himself.

James Gladstone O’Neill was born on October 6, 1888, in a Broadway hotel, son to the popular actor, James O’Neill, and Ella Quinlan. He was raised in the world of theater, and, as a result, in his boyhood and teen years he traveled all over America.

At eighteen, O’Neill entered Princeton but was expelled for a drunken prank and “general hell-raising.” Thereafter he drifted. He served briefly as a business firm clerk, tried his hand at gold prospecting in Central America, and finally signed on a ship as an ordinary seaman in the Atlantic trade routes. After three years of wandering, he returned to New York, supporting himself with odd jobs and living on that city’s squalid waterfront. In 1912, the year in which Long Day’s Journey into Night is set, O’Neill broke off his three-year marriage to Kathleen Jenkins. In that same year, ill with tuberculosis and haunted by his “rebellious dissipations,” he reached a personal low point and even attempted suicide.

While in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, O’Neill studied the master dramatists of the world and set out to become a playwright. Dissatisfied with his early efforts in the form, he enrolled at Harvard to study the craft, becoming the most celebrated member of George Pierce Baker’s famous “47 Workshop.” His first plays were published in 1914, and his first staged play, Bound East for Cardiff, was produced in 1916. It was followed by Thirst, produced by the Provincetown Players in the summer of 1917. It was that group that gave O’Neill his artistic arena and, with its move to New York, quickly established his reputation as the chief innovator in theater.

O’Neill then began a very prolific stretch of writing that lasted over a dozen years and vaulted him into the front rank of American playwrights. Through the 1920s, he penned a group of major plays, including Beyond the Horizon (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920), Anna Christie (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God’s Chiliun Got Wings (1924), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), Strange Interlude (1926), Lazarus Laughed (1928), Dynamo (1929), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

O’Neill’s personal grief helped shape his dramatic vision. Between 1920 and 1923, O’Neill’s father, mother, and brother all died, leaving him deeply troubled. He attempted only one comedy, Ah, Wilderness (1933), concentrating instead on the grimmer side of life and relying heavily on the probing psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud. He also mined his own life for his themes and characters, most obviously in his later plays, in which he clearly attempted to exorcise his subconscious familial guilt and sorrow.

O’Neill’s reputation in the United States went into something of a decline after 1930, perhaps because his vigorous innovation and experimentation gave way to more morose autobiographical studies, some of which were not staged at the time. His international reputation remained high, however, and in 1936 he won the Nobel Prize in literature, only the second American at the time to have been so honored.

O’Neill and his third wife, Carlotta, went into relative seclusion in the late 1930s. Thereafter, in the 1940s, he was stricken with a degenerative neurological tremor which impaired his faculties and prevented him from undertaking new projects or completing work on his ambitious cycle of plays tentatively entitled “A Tale of Possessor Self-Dispossessed.” However, he finished Long Day’s Journey into Night, which many critics deem his crowning achievement. In the work’s dedication to Carlotta, O’Neill indicated that he was finally able to pay homage to his family, the “four haunted Tyrones,” and to write about his past “with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness.”

In his last active years, O’Neill finished plays that now rank among his very best, including The Iceman Cometh (1946) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947). Other later plays include A Touch of the Poet (1957) and Hughie (1959), which, like Long Day’s Journey into Night, were first produced posthumously. By the time he died in 1953, O’Neill had written over thirty significant dramatic works and solidified his reputation as America’s premier dramatist.