The Sean O'Casey Reader: Plays, Autobiographies, Opinions

Sean O'Casey and Brooks Atkinson had been friends for many years until the death of the former in 1964 in his eighty-fifth year. Their relationship had started as a purely professional one in the nineteen twenties when O'Casey began to write plays and Atkinson to review them but gradually developed by correspondence and visits into a warm friendship. It is particularly appropriate that Brooks Atkinson should edit THE SEAN O'CASEY READER, a tribute to an old friend and a memorial to a great writer.

Mr. Atkinson begins with a long and perspective introduction, an appreciation of both man and artist, scrupulous in not permitting his feeling for the first to color his judgment of the second. His selection of the O'Casey works is divided into three parts: PLAYS, nine in all, from "Juno and the Paycock" (1924) to "The Drums of Father Ned" (1959); AUTOBIOGRAPHIES--a skilled extracting from the six volumes of autobiography, the result of a more straight-forward accountthan the original of O'Casey's own story without any sacrifice of his style; OPINIONS--a selection of essays and articles, those "blasts and benedictions" so colorful and exuberant like everything else O'Casey wrote. Included in this selection is "I Wanna Woman," one of the playwright's few short stories.