Biography (Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition)
Brendan Behan was born February 9, 1923, in Dublin, Ireland, the
first child of Stephen and Kathleen (Kearney) Behan, though his
mother had two sons by a previous marriage. Born into a family
with radical political leanings, Behan was reared on a double
dose of IRA propaganda and Catholicism. The radical Left was
part of his genetic makeup. His grandmother and a grandfather
were jailed for their roles in the revolution, the former for
illegal possession of explosives when she was seventy years old
and the latter for his part in the murder of Lord Cavendish.
Both of Behan’s parents fought in the Irish Revolution and in
the Troubles. Ultimately jailed for his participation in the
violence, Behan’s father saw his son for the first time through
prison bars.  Behan was a precocious child whose reverence for
writers was spawned by his father’s readings of Samuel Pepys,
Charles Dickens,Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, and various
polemical treatises to hi