'I thought that no man liveth and dieth to himself, so I put behind what I thought and what I did the panorama of the world I lived in - the things that made me.'

Sean O'Casey, 1948

Sean O'Casey's six-part Autobiography, originally published between 1939 and 1955, is an eloquently comprehensive self-portrait of an artist's life and times, unsurpassed in literature.

As its title suggests, "Rose and Crown" (1952) reflects O'Casey's experience of making a new home in England where, socialist passion intact, he makes a sharp study of the General Strike of 1926. "Sunset and Evening Star" (1954) offers both valediction and celebration: for though O'Casey views Ireland as 'a decaying ark... afraid of the falling rain of the world's thought', he can still envisage the nation's young 'throwing out some of the musty stuff, bringing the fresh and the new...'

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The most famous play by this remarkable Irish dramatist. Juno and the Paycock has been produced throughout the world and offers a compelling look at the family conflicts of struggling Irish matriarch Juno Boyle's Herculean attempts to keep her children safe and her husband "Captain" Jack Boyle sober despite his foolish schemes and the ongoing "troubles" in early 20th century Dublin.

Drama

Sean O'Casey

Characters: 10 male, 5 female

Three interior and exterior scenes

This play is gripping from beginning to end. It has to do with the futile efforts of the leader of one of the Irish revolutions. He is finally killed and his wife goes mad after losing her unborn child.

This is the first account of the formation of the Irish Citizen Army during the Dublin strike of 1913-1914, and the part it played in the subsequent history of Ireland. The author, who was himself a leading figure in the movement, writes with vigor and conviction on the role of labor in Ireland, and expresses a very definite opinion on the relations of the workers to the Nationalist movement. The book contains character portraits of Larkin, Connolly and the Countess Markiewicz; and facts bearing on the relations between the Citizen Army and the Volunteers emerge here for the first time.This dramatic account of the Irish Citizen Army also has its special importance in literary history as the first published work by Sean O'Casey (under the pseudonym of P. O. Cathasaigh). Sean O'Casey went on to become Ireland's greatest playwright as well as the author of one of the most fascinating autobiographies in the history of literature.

Three early plays by Sean O'Casey—arguably his three greatest—demonstrate O'Casey's ability to convey the reality of life and the depth of human emotion, specifically in Dublin before and during the Irish civil war of 1922-23, but, truly, throughout the known universe. In mirroring the lives of the Dublin poor, from the tenement dwellers in The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock to the bricklayer, street vendor, and charwoman in The Plough and the Stars, Sean O'Casey conveys with urgency and eloquence the tiny details that create a total character as well as the terrors, large and small, that the constant threat of political violence inevitably brings.