Description

Sean O Casey (1880-1964), a self-educated Dublin labourer, first became famous as a dramatist when the Abbey Theatre staged The Shadown of a Gunman in 1923. Two more masterly plays based on the Irish troubles of the period followed, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars . After a bitter dispute with W.B. Yeats over the Abbey Theatre s rejection of The Silver Tassie , O Casey, who had moved to London in 1926, decided never to return to Ireland. In England he continued to write plays, experimenting all the time in new forms of drama, to compile his autobiographies and to produce a constant stream of socialist political comment on world affairs. One of the giants of modern drama, he died in Devon in 1964. This biography is the work of one of the most distinguished of all Abbey directors.