Playwright David Mercer was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, the son of working-class parents, Edward and Helen Steadman Mercer. After twice failing the exams necessary to enter grammar school, Mercer, at age fourteen, went to work as a laboratory technician doing postmortems. He served as a pathological laboratory technician with the Royal Navy from 1945 to 1948. After leaving the navy. Mercer returned to school on an exserviceman's grant. He began his studies at Durham University in chemistry but soon realized that he really wanted to be a painter. He transferred to art school and received his B.A. with honors from King's College in Newcastle in 1953.

It was while he was at school that Mercer began to do a great deal of reading in many areas, including philosophy, psychology, and history, and started to see connections between Marxist political philosophy and his working-class background. Mercer later recalled that working-class children...