Out After Dark by Hugh Leonard
This title presents the memoirs of Ireland's acclaimed author and playwright, Hugh Leonard. Born in 1926 in Dublin, he was educated at Presentation College, Dun Laoghaire. He is an award winning playwright and screenwriter, and was Literary Editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin 1976-77. He now lives in Dalkey in County Dublin. This second volume of autobiography is a portrait of adolescence in Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s: schooldays and altar-boyhood, early bliss in the sevenpennies at the Astoria, problems with Gloria and Dolores. Leonard stirs in theatre ancedotes, vignettes of Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan and divulges his own beginnings as a writer. The result is a humorous analysis of Dublin and Dubliners.