Long Day's Journey into Night is a deeply autobiographical play that Eugene O'Neill wrote in the early 1940s, but didn't allow to be published or performed until after his death. Like the play's character Edmund Tyrone, O'Neill was himself the child of a Broadway actor, and the O'Neills were Irish American like the Tyrones as well. Catholicism plays a large role in both families, with a religious and hypocritical father appalled by his sons' seeming rejection of the Church and Christian faith. O'Neill's father was an alcoholic; like James Tyrone, he set aside a promising Shakespearean acting career to take on a commercially lucrative but artistically worthless play called Monte Cristo....
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