Although Brendan Behan was the major new voice of Irish drama in the 1950s, for most of his contemporaries, his life was better known than his work. This situation was probably inevitable after he received international fame--and notoriety--in the wake of the first English production of his first full-length play, The Quare Fellow, in 1956. His legendary drunkenness, the cheerful manner in which he embraced publicity, and his tragic early death from alcohol-induced diabetes in 1964, all ensured that he would never be far from the public gaze in a culture that was beginning, timidly, to open its doors after the austerity of the immediate postwar years.

In fact, his life and work were inextricably linked, and Behan's best known writing was based on his personal experience. The Quare Fellow was set in a Dublin prison, and Behan had spent four years in Irish prisons between 1942 and 1946. The Hostage (1958) concerned...