Reading Order
Long Day's Journey into Night Reading Order
Long Day's Journey into Night (written 1941, published and premiered 1956) by Eugene O'Neill is the greatest American play — the Tyrone family's terrible day and night in August 1912: the father James Tyrone (a famous actor who has wasted his talent on a commercial success), the mother Mary (who has returned to morphine addiction), and the brothers Jamie (the elder, alcoholic and self-destructive) and Edmund (the younger, who has tuberculosis and is based on O'Neill himself). O'Neill wrote the play as a private document, instructing his wife Carlotta never to publish it; she published it three years after his death. The play is organized around the progressive revelation of what each member of the family blames the others for, moving through a day and a night of accusation, self-justification, and the terrible tenderness of people who love and damage each other simultaneously. It is O'Neill's most autobiographical work and the one in which his theatrical gifts are most fully realized.
Where to start
Long Day's Journey into Night (written 1941, published 1956) — the complete play. Supplementary reading: O'Neill's essays and letters illuminate the autobiographical dimension, but the play is self-sufficient. Best O'Neill reading order: Desire Under the Elms (1924) → The Iceman Cometh (1946) → Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) → A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947/1957)
Complete Long Day's Journey into Night Book List
- 1Buy
Long Day's Journey into Night
Eugene O'Neill·1956·The masterwork — the Tyrone family's terrible day and night of accusation and recognition. The most autobiographical and most fully realized of O'Neill's plays, and the greatest American drama - 2Buy
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller·1949·The companion and the other 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 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 - 3Buy
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams·1947·The companion in the American theater of the 1940s-50s — Blanche DuBois in New Orleans, her confrontation with Stanley Kowalski, her breakdown. A Streetcar Named Desire and Long Day's Journey into Night are the three pillars of mid-century American drama (with Death of a Salesman), and both are organized around the confrontation between a romantic self-conception (Blanche; Mary Tyrone's image of herself as a convent girl) and the brutal reality of the present - 4Buy
Ghosts
Henrik Ibsen·1882·The Ibsenian precursor — Mrs. Alving's revelation of the truth about Captain Alving's life. O'Neill read Ibsen with enormous admiration and called him the father of modern drama. Long Day's Journey into Night inherits directly from Ghosts: the same formal technique (the past breaking through 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 living in illusions) - 5Buy
The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams·1945·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 - 6Buy
Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov·1901·Chekhov's companion in the theatrical 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 with their situation, and whose confinement reveals the depth of their mutual damage and mutual love - 7Buy
Mourning Becomes Electra
Eugene O'Neill·1931·O'Neill's earlier companion — the Mannon family's tragedy in a New England town 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: Mourning Becomes Electra uses the Oresteia's structure, Long Day's Journey into Night uses the Ibsenian revelation technique, but both are organized around the same sense that the family's past determines the family's present with a force that no individual will can overcome - 8Buy
The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O'Neill·1946·The companion O'Neill play and the one most frequently compared to Long Day's Journey — 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 the same question: what do illusions (pipe dreams; Mary Tyrone's belief she will stop using morphine; Willy Loman's belief he is well-liked) do to the people who maintain them, and what happens when the illusions are taken away?
Long Day's Journey into Night — Frequently Asked Questions
Why did O'Neill not want Long Day's Journey into Night published?
O'Neill wrote Long Day's Journey into Night between 1939 and 1941 and inscribed the manuscript to his wife Carlotta with the words: 'This play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.' He instructed Carlotta that the play should not be published until twenty-five years after his death, and that it should never be produced on stage. He did not want the play published because it is nakedly autobiographical — James Tyrone is his father James O'Neill (with accurate details about his miser's habits and his waste of his talent on The Count of Monte Cristo); Mary Tyrone is his mother Ella (with accurate details about her morphine addiction); Jamie is his brother Jamie (with accurate details about his alcoholism and self-destruction); and Edmund is O'Neill himself (with accurate details about his tuberculosis). O'Neill feared that publication would be experienced as an act of betrayal by his surviving family members and a violation of what he owed to the dead. Carlotta published the play in 1956, three years after O'Neill's death, saying that his intention had been for it eventually to be read.
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