Seán O’Casey (30 March, 1880 – 18 September, 1964) was an Irish dramatist and playwright. 1) Suffering from poor eyesight, you Mr. O’Casey had trouble at school, but taught himself to read and write by age 13. 2) His father died with he was six years old, and the family (of thirteen!) had to move from house to house in North Dublin. 3) At age fourteen Mr. O’Casey left school and started working. Life was hard and he was once fired because he did not take his cap off when collecting his pay. 4) His birth name is John, but as he got more involved in politics and took up the Irish nationalist cause, he changed his name to Sean. 5) He got his inspiration to write after Thomas Ashe, a friend, died in a hunger strike in 1917. 6) His 1923 play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was the first to be accepted and performed at the Abbey Theatre, which began a long and fruitful relationship. 7) Mr. O’Casey is known as the first Irish playwright to write about Dublin’s working class. 8) In 1934, while visiting New York City for the production of his play Within the Gates, he met and friended Eugene O’Neill. He liked the production…

Dr. Samuel Johnson (18 September, 1709 – 12 December, 1784) was an English write, poet and essayist who has made large contributions to English literature. “Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds 2” by Joshua Reynolds – Originally in English Wikipedia, uploaded 21:07, 2005 June 14 by w:User:Geogre Scanned from: Rogers, Pat (2001). The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Oxford University Press, p. 241. ISBN 1435295811. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, Samuel Johnson showed much intelligence as a child, he started school at the age of 4 and was doing so well he was promoted to the upper school at 9. Johnson has been referred to as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”. Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) has a great effect on modern English. The dictionary was described as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship”. Johnson is the subject of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, a biography which was described as “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”. Johnson was known for his strange behavior and mannerisms, some of which were described in Life of Samuel Johnson. Posthumously, Dr….

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William Butler Yeats (13 June, 1865- 28 January, 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer. He is considered one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century.

Yesterday we celebrated James Joyce’s birthday. Joyce is well known for his stream of consciousness novel Ulysses. Books by James Joyce 1 ) James Joyce was the eldest of 10 children born in Dublin, Ireland. 2 ) An outstanding student, Joyce learned Norwegian so he can read Henrik Ibsen place in their original language. 3 ) Joyce’s wife and mother to his children, Nora Barnacle, was uneducated by lively which is why he fell in love with her. 4 ) Between 1917 and 1930 Joyce hand 25 operations on his eyes. 5 ) Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, a rewrite of a novel he abandoned, won Joyce several benefactors including Edith Rockefeller. 6 ) The novel Ulysses started out as a serial in Little Review, an American magazine. However, the U.S. Post Office stopped distributing the magazine because, according to them, the novel was obscene. 7 ) Ulysses was self published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, over of Shakespeare and Co. in Paris. 8 ) The name of the elementary particle “quark” in quantum physics comes from the line Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. 9 ) the works and life of James Joyce…

John Connolly is a best selling author journalist & radio show host. I was introduced to John’s work reading “The Gates” a supernatural book which I loved