Description

Long Day's Journey into Night unfolds over a single August day in 1912 in the Tyrone family's seaside Connecticut home, compressing a lifetime of grievance into an evening of mounting confession. In a prose of lucid, brutal lyricism, O'Neill weds Ibsenite realism to a tragic cadence reminiscent of Greek drama: incremental revelations, ritual returns, and the insistent toll of the foghorn. Addiction, illness, miserliness, and thwarted ambition circulate through the family's dialogue, and the fog outside mirrors the moral and psychological obscurations within. The result is American drama's paradigmatic study of familial entanglement. O'Neill's own biography furnishes the play's pulse: son of a celebrated actor and a mother long dependent on morphine, he knew itinerant theatrical life, corrosive thrift, and the undertow of drink. Stricken with tuberculosis as a young man, he experienced the sanatorium discipline that shadows Edmund. A Nobel laureate and relentless experimenter, he wrote this work late, intending it for posthumous release, as if only death could authorize such unsparing self-scrutiny. Readers and theatergoers seeking the pinnacle of modern tragedy will find inexhaustible richness here: a master class in character, subtext, and time. Essential for students, actors, and anyone probing how families love, wound, and endure.

Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.