Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in 1888, not far from the theaters that the O'Neill family came to know so well. For decades, his famous father, actor James O'Neill, toured the American theater circuit, his family dutifully in tow. Eugene grew up despising what he perceived as the trite, commercial nature of the industry around him, and when he turned to writing drama in 1912, he resolved to write a very different kind of play for American audiences. The troubles of his Irish- American family inspired many autobiographical portraits in his works, and he was lauded as the finest tragedian the United States had ever produced. When he died in 1953, he left behind among other great plays Long Day's journey into Night, which was so personal that he ordered it not to be published until twenty-five years after his death.
Morphine addiction. Blaming the rheumatism in her hands, the aging mother of O'Neill's fictional Tyrone family starts to take morphine again. Like many middle-class women of her generation, she becomes addicted by using medication prescribed for her at a time when the effects of the drug were not fully understood.
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