This week I’m looking at the titles from Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Casey and Eileen O’Casey published by PAN in the 1970’s. The majority of them have a photographic cover of which I am not that keen but as there was so many of them I have decided I will share them.
Frank O’Connor (Michael Francis O’Donovan) was born in 1903 in Cork, County Cork, Ireland and died on March 10, 1966 in Dublin. He was an Irish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer who, as a critic and as a translator of Gaelic works from the 9th to the 20th century, served as an interpreter of Irish life and literature to the English-speaking world. Raised in poverty, a childhood he recounted in An Only Child, O’Connor received little formal education before going to work as a librarian in Cork and later in Dublin.
Sean O’Casey (John Casey) was born 30th March 1880 in Dublin and died 18 September 1964 in Torquay. He was an Irish dramatist and was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. O’Casey’s first accepted play, ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. While in London to supervise the West End production of ‘Juno and the Paycock’ O’Casey fell in love with Eileen Carey (stage name). The couple were married in 1927 and remained in London until 1938 when they moved to Totnes.
Eileen O’Casey (Eileen Kathleen Reynolds) born in Dublin on the 27th December 1900, She attended the Brentwood Ursuline Convent High School and having read ‘Juno and the Paycock’ she developed an obsessive need to meet the author. She met O’Casey when 17 years his junior, and he immediately invited her to take the role of Nora Clitheroe in ‘The Plough and the Stars’ for its first London production. The O’Caseys married on the 23rd September 1927 in the Catholic church of ‘All Souls and the Redeemer’ in Chelsea. She died in London on the 9th April 1995.