Long Day's Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill was born in New York City in 1888 and died in Boston in 1953. One of America's greatest playwrights, he was three times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.

Long Day's Journey into Night was written in 1940 but not staged until 1956, after O'Neill's death. Unashamedly autobiographical, it is, as he puts it himself in the dedicatory note, 'a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood', a harrowing attempt to understand himself and his family.