Sean O'Casey's considerable literary achievements have been overshadowed by the contentious political circumstances which informed much of his art as well as his life. Long recognized as the first and best dramatist of the Dublin tenements during the Irish "troubles" (1916-1923), O'Casey maintained for a lifetime a love-hate relationship with Ireland, yet his writings often transcend their national themes and proletarian sympathies to realize a universal tragicomic experience. Perhaps no playwright has explored more exhaustively the modern theater's possibilities for showing the social conflicts and antinomies of the present age. His work is notable for its characteristically individual mode of expression, its superb comic vitality, and memorable idiosyncratic characters.

In his life, as in his writings, O'Casey brought together disparate realities and sought to reconcile them. Born John Casey on 30 March 1880--a Protestant in predominantly Catholic Dublin--he became an Irish nationalist who lived the last thirty-eight years of...