I Knock at The Door. Swift Glances Back at Things That Made Me. London: Macmillan, 1939. First Edition. Frontispiece Portrait. Cloth boards, title lettered in gilt within red panel to spine. Light shelf wear to covers, browning to front pastedown and preliminary leaves, upper margins of pp 268/69 stained; lacks the dust jacket.

Presentation copy, Inscribed by O’Casey in the year of publication.

The first volume in O’Casey’s autobiography which he published in seven volumes over a fifteen year period.

Born John Casey on March 30, 1880, in Dublin, O’Casey grew up in a Protestant family that fell into poverty after his father’s death. Despite suffering from poor eyesight and limited formal education, he taught himself to read and became deeply influenced by literature, politics, and Irish nationalism. O’Casey was the first major Irish playwright to focus on the urban working class, diverging from the rural themes common in Irish drama.

He died on September 18, 1964, in Torquay, Devon, England, leaving behind a legacy of socially conscious theatre that reshaped Irish drama