'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 "Autobiographies," originally published between 1939 and 1955, is an eloquently comprehensive self-portrait of an artist's life and times, unsurpassed in literature.

This volume contains the first two parts: "I Knock at the Door" (1939) and "Pictures in the Hallway" (1942). The former charts the childhood of young 'John Cassidy' (as O'Casey was christened), powerfully marked by the death of his father and his affliction by the eye infection trachoma. "Pictures in the Hallway" carries the story into John's adolescence, and tentative steps into the adult world of work, the opposite sex and political awakening.

'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.

"Drums Under the Windows" (1945) sees O'Casey's young (pre-writing) life taking shape amid the extraordinary tumult of Ireland in the early twentieth century, thus leading him into the fray of the Easter Rising of 1916. "Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well" (1949) charts the steps towards his emigration from Ireland in 1926: a move pressed upon O'Casey by his hard struggle against the restrictions and prohibitions wrought by Irish society, church and state.

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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 educational edition, with the full play text and an introduction to the playwright, features a detailed analysis of the language, structure and characters of the play, and textual notes explaining difficult words and references. It contains: - The full playtext - An introduction to the playwright, his background and his work - A detailed analysis of language, structure and characters in the play - Features of performance - Textual notes explaining difficult words and references Professor Murray's notes, to be read alongside the full playtext provided here, will enable students to better understand, appreciate, enjoy and write about O'Casey's greatest play.

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.

Ireland, World War One. Dashing Harry Heegan leads his football team to victory, arriving home in swaggering celebration before he grabs his kit and heads for the trenches. A nightmare world awaits, the men, reduced to cannon fodder, speaking in mangled incantations as the casualties stack up. Months later, Harry returns, a cripple at the football club party. Everyone but the shattered war veterans dance and forget. Peppered with acrid wit and dark vaudeville humour, The Silver Tassie, Sean O'Casey's powerful anti-war play of 1928, receives a major revival at the National Theatre in April 2014.

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.