Hugh Leonard is the pen name of John Keyes Byrne, who was born on November 9, 1926, in Dublin, Ireland Leonard is the adopted son of Nicholas Keyes, a gardener, and Margaret (Doyle) Byrne, a homemaker. He was born John Byrne, later adding the surname of his adopted father as his middle name In 1941, Leonard attended College Glasthule on scholarship. In 1945, he was employed by the Irish civil service as a writer in the Department of Lands, where he worked until 1959. S. F. Gallagher relates, in his introduction to The Selected Plays of Hugh Leonard, that "Leonard had never seen a play until during his first year in the civil service a colleague derided his Ignorance of theatre and goaded him into attending an Abbey Theatre production of Sean 0' Casey' s Plough.....
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