Red Roses for Me (Author Biography)

Author Biography

O'Casey was born John Casey on March 30, 1880, in Dublin, Ireland. The youngest of eight children, O'Casey is one of the five that survived past early childhood. O'Casey's father died when the author was only six years old, creating large financial problems for the rest of the family. Due to these circumstances, as well as a childhood eye disease that affected his vision throughout his life, O'Casey received very little formal schooling. Despite his eye condition, however, the author began in his early teens to teach himself to read, and he read Shakespeare and other classics. At the age of fourteen, he also began to work various odd jobs, including clerical positions and manual labor, although he also spent long periods of time unemployed. From 1901 to 1911, O'Casey worked for the Great Northern Railway of Ireland. During the same time period, he renounced his Protestant faith and became increasingly agnostic. In 1913, O'Casey worked to support the union cause during the Great Dublin Lock-Out by publishing newspaper articles and devoting time as an organizational and secretarial volunteer. This event influenced the author's political stance, and during the same year he helped to form, and became the first secretary for, the Irish Citizen Army — a militant branch of the Irish trade-union movement. He left a year later, however, when the army's leadership turned toward a more nationalist, rather than a socialist, approach.

In the late 1910s, O'Casey began writing his first plays, several of which were rejected. His first full-length play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed at Dublin's renowned Abbey Theatre in 1923. The play became very popular, and the following spring the Abbey Theatre produced O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock (1924). This was followed by The Plough and the Stars (1926), which has arguably become O'Casey's most popular play. These first three plays, all of which depicted the harsh physical and political realities of life in Dublin, set the tone for many of O'Casey's later works. In 1926, O'Casey was invited to London to receive the Hawthornden Prize for Juno and the Paycock. While he was there, he met the Irish actress, Eileen Carey Reynolds, and the two were married in 1927. The couple settled in England, where O'Casey wrote The Silver Tassie (1929), a play that criticized the events of World War I and the effect that this monumental conflict had on society. The experimental play was rejected by the Abbey Theatre, so O'Casey had it produced in London, where it was a critical success but a popular failure. During the 1930s, O'Casey produced very little drama and began to focus instead on criticism, short stories, and autobiographical writings, the first of which was I Knock at the Door (1939). During the 1940s and early 1950s, O'Casey produced five more volumes of autobiography. He also wrote Red Roses for Me (1943), which most critics agree is O'Casey's most autobiographical work. O'Casey died on September 18, 1964, in Torquay, England.