Long Day's Journey into Night (Yale Nota Bene) (24 page)

She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless.

CURTAIN

Tao House
September 20, 1940

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) was born in New York City, the son of James O’Neill, a popular actor, and Mary Ellen Quinlan. During his childhood years he lived mainly in hotels with his family, following the tours of his father’s company; the only permanent home the young O’Neill knew was a summer cottage in New London, Connecticut, which later became the setting for
Long Day’s Journey into Night.

As an adolescent, O’Neill attended eastern preparatory schools and then Princeton University for one year until he was expelled. During the next five years he worked as a gold prospector, a sailor, an actor, and a reporter.

O’Neill began writing plays in 1913, and by 1916 his one-act play
Bound East for Cardiff
was produced in New York by the Provincetown Players, a group he had helped found. In 1920 his full-length play
Beyond the Horizon
was produced in New York and won O’Neill the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. During decades of extraordinary productivity, O’Neill published 24 other full-length plays. After receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, he published two of his most highly acclaimed plays,
The Iceman Cometh
and
A Moon for the Misbegotten.
O’Neill died in Boston in 1953.
Long Day’s Journey into Night,
often regarded as his finest work, was published three years after his death.