The youngest of Michael and Susan Archer Casey's eight children, of whom only five lived beyond early childhood, O'Casey experienced poverty and illness from an early age. His father's death (when the future playwright was only six years old) brought the family great hardship; O'Casey's education was retarded by a disease which seriously afflicted his eyes throughout his life; he had little schooling, and it was not until his early teens that he undertook his education seriously. From then on he read widely in Shakespeare and English classics and was introduced to the theater (mostly the works of Dion Boucicault and Shakespeare) at the age of eleven by his brother Isaac, who appears in O'Casey's autobiography as "Archie."
Starting work at fourteen in the stockroom of a hardware firm, O'Casey had several poorly paid clerical jobs (and long periods of unemployment) before he became a manual laborer in his late teens. From 1901 until 1911 he worked in that capacity for the Great Northern Railway of Ireland.
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