Autobiographies I

'I thought that no man liveth and dieth to himself, so I put behind what I thought and what I did the panorama of the world I lived in - the things that made me.'

Sean O'Casey, 1948

Sean O'Casey's six-part Autobiographies, originally published between 1939 and 1955, is an eloquently comprehensive self-portrait of an artist's life and times, unsurpassed in literature.

This volume contains the first two parts: I Knock at the Door (1939) and Pictures in the Hallway (1942). The former charts the childhood of young 'John Cassidy' (as O'Casey was christened), powerfully marked by the death of his father and his affliction by the eye infection trachoma. Pictures in the Hallway carries the story into John's adolescence, and tentative steps into the adult world of work, the opposite sex and political awakening.