His autobiography,
Borstal Boy (1958), which was an international best-seller, dealt largely with his experiences in incarceration in an English borstal (reform school) in 1940-1941. After Behan had become famous, much of his nontheatrical work (some of which was published posthumously) either reflected on his early life or detailed his responses to the new and bewildering situations into which his celebrity had catapulted him (as well as being attempts by publishers to capitalize on Behan's success when his alcoholism made new work impossible).
Behan was frequently seen in terms of outrageous stereotypes. Yet, in many ways he was not typical of the working class that produced him; that is, he was not in any real sense a statistically "average" representative of the Dublin proletariat, as was often assumed. Brendan Francis Behan was born in Dublin on 9 February 1923. His father, Stephen, was a housepainter, as his father had been before him. However, both his parents had known middle-class comforts (though not in their married lives).
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