Autobiographies II

'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.