Brendan Behan was born in 1923 in a Dublin neighborhood. In 1939, at the young age of 16, he was detained in Liverpool as a member of the IRA and imprisoned in the infamous youth prison in Borstal where he spent three years. Brendan Behan returned to Ireland but in 1942 he was sentenced by a military court to 14 years in prison for having shot at an Irish policeman. In 1946 he was set free thanks to a general amnesty. The following year he was imprisoned yet again, this time in Manchester after helping an IRA prisoner escape. The time he spent drunk in pubs, in prison, and doing manual labor didn't impede him from writing and in 1954, almost overnight he became a widely renowned author when a vanguard London theatre represented his "The Quare Fellow", based on the prison life of a man condemned to death. The theatre of Brendan Behan in his own way the tradition of George Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey, heterodox in form as well as in content with elements of tragedy and farce, full of vitality and humor. In 1958, he presented in London "The Hostage", written originally in the Gaelic language with title "An Gaill". That same year he published "Borstal Boy". In 1962, he published "Brendan Behan's Island", in 1963 "Hold Your Hour and Have Another", as well as various works for the theatre. The struggle that he carried out with alcohol throughout his life sent him to an early grave in 1964 at the age of 41.
