Long Day's Journey Into Night tells the story of the Tyrone family: James Tyrone Sr., a famous actor who gave up successful career as a Shakespearean actor to appear in a long-running and commercially succesful, but artistically unfulfilling play; Mary Cavan Tyrone, his wife, long lost in the haze of a morphine addiction acquired when the difficult delivery of her son Edmund was complicated further by the incompetence of her doctor; Edmund, the Tyrone's youngest son, a poet suffering from a respiratory condition and deep disillusionment with the world; and James Jr., Edmund's alcoholic ne'er-do-well brother. The play is autobiographical, and each of the characters represents a member of O'Neill's own family. It was written for his wife Carlotta, to whom O'Neill presented it on the occasion of their twelfth wedding anniversary in 1941. Not produced until three years after O'Neill's death, Long Day's Journey Into Night earned him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize and returned him to his rightful place at the forefront of American drama.