Eugene O’Neill’s Monte Cristo Cottage

Connecticut is not too far for a good road trip and on this day, it brought us to Eugene O’Neill’s home in New London.

This house, known as the Monte Cristo Cottage, was the family’s summer home, and decades later it became immortalized as the setting for “Long Day’s Journey into Night”. This is one of the most powerful and autobiographical works in American theatre, written by O’Neill, who would go on to win multiple Pulitzer Prizes and became America’s only Nobel Prize winning playwright.  

From the porch, you can look toward the river where ships used to move in and out of the harbor. In O’Neill’s youth, New London was a busy port town, full of travelers and sailors. O’Neill’s father was a touring actor who was frequently away.

This was not a carefree home. The family struggled with illness, addiction, financial tension and complicated relationships. O’Neill’s mother became dependent on morphine after a difficult childbirth his father wrestled with guilt and Eugene himself endured tuberculosis and lifelong battles with alcoholism and depression. Those lived experiences were the eventually transformed into the searing family drama that unfolds in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” 

Like so many of the historic homes we visited, this one made literature tangible. We were not reading Eugene O’Neill, but instead, standing inside the environment that shaped him. Monte Cristo Cottage was not a happy home but is preserved because one of America’s greatest playwrights used the experience to tell the story of his family life.  

As I have written, our historic homes are preserved for different reasons. This road trip stop showed us to view a complicated life as it unfolded in the stories that lasted.