Recommendations
Books Like Long Day's Journey into Night
Best books to read after Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill's 1956 greatest play — the Tyrone family's terrible day and night of accusation, love, and recognition in August 1912 — is the most autobiographical and most fully realized American drama, the direct inheritor of the Ibsenian tradition in the American theater. These recommendations extend the experience through O'Neill's other major plays, through the mid-century American theatrical tradition, and through fiction and drama that investigates the family as the site of Greek tragic necessity in American conditions.
- 1Buy
Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
The companion great American family play — Willy Loman's terrible final two days. Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman are the two greatest American family plays: both organized around a father whose self-deception has damaged his sons, both using a concentrated time frame to reveal the accumulated weight of the family's past, both asking whether the father's dream was a lie or a life.
- 2Buy
A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
Williams's 1947 companion in the American theater of the same decade — Blanche DuBois in New Orleans, her confrontation with Stanley Kowalski. Long Day's Journey into Night and A Streetcar Named Desire are companion investigations of the romantic self (Mary Tyrone's image of herself as a convent girl; Blanche's image of herself as a southern belle) that the present can no longer support, and both end with the romantic's destruction.
- 3Buy
Ghosts
by Henrik Ibsen
The Ibsenian precursor that O'Neill most directly inherited — Mrs. Alving's revelation of the truth about Captain Alving's life. O'Neill explicitly acknowledged Ibsen as his theatrical father. Long Day's Journey into Night inherits directly from Ghosts: the same formal technique (the past pressing into the present in a single day, the gradual revelation of what has been concealed), and the same thematic concern (the past's damage to the present, the cost of illusions).
- 4Buy
The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams
Williams's companion memory play — Tom Wingfield's memories of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. Both Long Day's Journey into Night and The Glass Menagerie are organized around the tension between the family as a source of love and the family as a source of entrapment — the playwright's own family in both cases — and both are saturated with the playwright's ambivalence about the world from which he escaped.
- 5Buy
The Iceman Cometh
by Eugene O'Neill
The companion O'Neill play — the regulars at Harry Hope's bar, waiting for the salesman Hickey who will destroy their pipe dreams. The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night are companion investigations of illusion and its costs: what do pipe dreams do to the people who maintain them, and what happens when the illusions are taken away? Both plays are organized around the same question and answer it differently.
- 6Buy
Three Sisters
by Anton Chekhov
Chekhov's companion in the tradition of the family play about unfulfilled desire and the accumulated weight of the past — the Prozorov sisters waiting for Moscow. Long Day's Journey into Night and Three Sisters are companion plays about families confined together, whose individual desires are incongruent with each other, and whose confinement reveals the depth of their mutual damage and mutual love. O'Neill learned from Chekhov as well as from Ibsen.
- 7Buy
Mourning Becomes Electra
by Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill's earlier companion — the Mannon family's tragedy in New England after the Civil War, organized around the Oresteia. Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day's Journey into Night are companion investigations of the family as the site of Greek tragic necessity in American conditions: the earlier play uses the Oresteia's structure, the later uses the Ibsenian revelation technique, but both are organized around the same sense that the family's past determines the family's present.
- 8Buy
A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry's 1959 companion in the tradition of the American family play about aspiration and constraint — the Younger family's attempt to use Walter Lee's life insurance to move to a better neighborhood. A Raisin in the Sun and Long Day's Journey into Night are companion American family plays about the complicated love between family members who need each other and damage each other simultaneously — but where O'Neill's family is white and the damage is primarily emotional, Hansberry's family is Black and the damage is also racial and economic.
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