Seán O'Casey (1880 – 1964) was a major Irish dramatist and memoirist. Born John Casey, he was a committed socialist, and the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. His plays are particularly noted for the sympathetic treatment of female characters.

O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed on the stage of the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist, but that ended in some bitterness.

The play deals with the impact of revolutionary politics on Dublin's slums and their inhabitants. It was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), probably O'Casey's two finest plays.

The former deals with the impact of the Irish Civil War on the working class poor of the city, while the latter is set in Dublin in 1916 around the Easter Rising, which was, in fact, a middle-class affair, not a reaction by the poor.

The Plough and the Stars, an anti-nationalism play, was not well received by the Abbey audience and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. Regardless, O'Casey gave up his job and became a full-time writer.

In 1929, W. B. Yeats rejected O'Casey's fourth play, The Silver Tassie for the Abbey. An attack on imperialist wars, and those that suffer from them, The Abbey refused to show it, and as a result, O'Casey moved to England, where he spent the rest of his life.

In September 1964 at the age of 84, O'Casey died of a heart attack in Torquay, England.

Source - Wikipedia