Sean O’Casey
Sean O’Casey, (1880-1964). Irish dramatist. Born to a poor Protestant family, O’Casey worked as a manual labourer and was entirely self-educated. He joined the paramilitary Irish Citizen Army but left disillusioned in 1914. His early plays, staged by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, are mainly concerned with civil strife in Ire, land, and include Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), set during the 1916 Easter Rising. Although many of his plays are set in times of crisis and war, O’Casey wrote some of the best comic scenes and dialogues in modern drama. After the Abbey rejected The Silver Tassie (1929), he left Ireland for Britain, where he married the Irish actress Eileen Carey Reynolds. He continued to write plays, as well as a six-volume autobiography.
