In this fourth and final volume, David Krause brings to a close his collection of the 2445 letters that Sean O'Casey wrote over a span of 54 years, from 1910 to 1964. At the age of 75, the beginning of the final decade of his life, O'Casey was still an active letter writer and controversial playwright although he had struggled with periodic bouts of near-blindness since early childhood. Seen through the letters, O'Casey emerges informally with all his strengths and weaknesses in full view, with all his paradoxical excesses ...
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In this fourth and final volume, David Krause brings to a close his collection of the 2445 letters that Sean O'Casey wrote over a span of 54 years, from 1910 to 1964. At the age of 75, the beginning of the final decade of his life, O'Casey was still an active letter writer and controversial playwright although he had struggled with periodic bouts of near-blindness since early childhood. Seen through the letters, O'Casey emerges informally with all his strengths and weaknesses in full view, with all his paradoxical excesses of Irish eloquence and insecurity, kindness and vindictiveness, compassion and pride, anger and idealism, scepticism and faith. At all stages of his life, O'Casey was a fighter equally for the charwoman with chilblains and for the great causes of Ireland. Prodigious and eloquent words were the only weapons he employed. The letters, as varied and complex as the man who wrote them, rival the plays in their portrayal of life as it touched him and the causes that moved him. At the end of 1958, O'Casey banned all professional productions of his plays in Ireland, a retaliatory measure in response to the archbishop of Dublin's ban of the Tostal Theatre Festival's production of O'Casey's 1957 play "The Drums of Father Ned". O'Casey upheld his ban, in spite of financial difficulties, until shortly before his death in 1964, and then he lifted it only conditionally so that the Abbey Theatre could present his work at a drama festival in London for the occasion of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare. This volume also includes letters that chronical O'Casey's bitter indictment of Russian and Irish censorship in a passionate defence of Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak. Although he was a man of strong political views, O'Casey considered himself to be a man of literature, not politics. The letters in this volume record that O'Casey continued to write and publish plays even in his waning years. "Figuro in the Night", a wicked comedy, was published in 1961, as were "Behind the Green Curtains", "The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe" and "Kathleen Listens In". Astonishingly forthright and open, O'Casey's letters expose the depth of a creative genius who refused to temper his extravagant emotions. Corresponding with the famous and the obscure alike, he filled his letters with moving anecdotes and sweeping theories, with humour, insights, and intimate confidences. Although this collection should be of special interest to every scholar of Irish drama or every library that specializes in Irish literature, it also provides an introduction to the work of O'Casey for the general reader.
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