Out After Dark (Methuen Biography) - Softcover

Leonard, Hugh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0413771482 ISBN 13: 9780413771483

Publisher: Methuen, 2002

Synopsis

Hugh Leonard's second volume of autobiography is a rich portrait of adolescence in Dublin in the 40s and 50s: schooldays and altar-boyhood, early bliss in the seven pennies at the Astoria, problems with Gloria and Dolores. Leonard stirs in theater anecdotes, vignettes of Patrick Kavanagh and Brenda Behan, and divulges his own beginnings as a writer. The result is a witty and entertaining analysis of Dublin and Dubliners by one of Ireland's finest playwrights.

About this title

About the Author:

Hugh Leonard (1926-2009) was the author of numerous plays, including The Au Pair Man and The Poker Session, the screenplay for the film Widow's Peak, and TV adaptations of Great Expectations, Good Behaviour, The Moonstone, Nicholas Nickleby, and Wuthering Heights. His novelisation of his 4-part drama Parnell and the Englishwoman (BBC) won the 1992 Sagittarius Award.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Strong, original, wrenching account of growing up out of wedlock in a small Irish town, by memoirist (Home Before Night, 1980) and playwright (Da) Leonard. Leonard writes with an elegant Irish accent, and his evocation of place is uncanny. Like Flann O'Brien, he writes about the town of Dalkey a great deal, often with a marvelous sense of humor. (Priests especially rouse him to outstanding efforts.) Irony and farce are everywhere, along with a calm, unblinking acceptance of human nature. His mother's periodic alcoholism (coinciding with the Christmas season) is a powerful, fully faced moment, and the dogged pursuit of sexual congress is an ongoing obbligato that evokes Dylan Thomas and a world long gone. (``I'm Protestant,'' says one promising lass, having deduced his Catholicism, and walks off with a smile; another girl's dying father struggles out of bed to investigate.) The bedrock is Leonard's long, hard, Horatio Alger climb from the ultimate obscurity of unwanted bastardy. From success in school exams and the start of a civil-service career (which represents as much success as he and his family could ever reasonably expect), Leonard struggles forward via tiny, hilarious, amateur provincial theater groups, drunk on whatever writer he is reading at the moment. All the while, his ambiguous origins (even as a child he is known by two names) mark him, as such things do in small communities. He makes it anyway. Powerful, funny, and moving: an effortless series of incidents full of droll wisdom. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0413771482
• ISBN 13: 9780413771483
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224