Sean O'Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography

"In Sean O'Casey: Writer at Work Christopher Murray takes a fresh look at the life of the last of the great writers of the Irish literary revival. Re-exploring the Dublin of O'Casey's childhood and the political situation in the Ireland during his early life, Murray sets them against O'Casey's autobiographies in an attempt to establish 'O'Casey's Ireland'. The second half of O'Casey's life was spent mostly outside Ireland and much of his income came from the United States. Murray examines his rise as an international figure and contrasts his later, more socialist, work with his more nationalist early work." "Christopher Murray establishes O'Casey as a self-made man of letters, an irrepressible fighter, a man who combined political courage and innocence, torn between a humanist vision of life rooted in his Dublin childhood and a utopian but blinkered loyalty to the Soviet Union." Sean O'Casey: Writer at Work reconstructs a life committed to writing as a moral endeavour. While acknowledging that much of O'Casey's work was uneven, flawed, and overambitious, Murray argues that at its best it was infused with a passion and generosity that place it among the best bodies of drama in the twentieth century.