The Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) is considered the greatest of the Irish playwrights who began writing after World War I.

Sean O’Casey was born John Casey on March 31, 1880, the youngest of a large family living in a Dublin slum. He suffered all his life from painful, ulcerated eyeballs and could not read or write until he was 13, having been forced to begin lessons by an interested Irish clergyman.

His later experiences among the laboring class in Dublin, where he worked first as an ironmonger, then as a day laborer despite his frail health, gave him a lifelong interest in the problems of the Irish working people. He was a Marxist and took an active part in proletarian reform movements, such as the transport workers strike of 1913, in which he worked with the labor leader Jim Larkin. Arrested as a political prisoner during the Easter Rebellion (1916), he narrowly escaped execution.

However, his later socialist and pacificist convictions, his disenchantment with the results of Irish independence, and his professional disappointment concerning the poor reception of his plays led him to leave Ireland in 1926. He announced that his exile was final in 1928, when the Abbey Theatre’s director William Butler Yeats rejected O’Casey’s play The Silver Tassie (1928) as “unsuitable.” Earlier, in announcing his break with the Gaelic League, O’Casey had deplored the preference of contemporary Irish audiences for a “Caithlin ni Houlihan in a respectable dress rather than a Caithlin in the garb of a working woman”–a reference to the romantic and aristocratic treatment of Ireland by Yeats and his circle.

In 1928 O’Casey married Eileen Reynolds, an actress, and returned secretly to Dublin (Howth) for the honeymoon. The O’Caseys and their three children then made Devon, England, their permanent home.