In March 1926, the USA saw its first production of an O’Casey play, when a version of Juno and the Paycock appeared at the Mayfair Theater in New York. The text was praised by two of the twentieth century’s most influential theatre reviewers, George Jean Nathan and Brooks Atkinson, who became major American supporters of O’Casey and his work. Their efforts were bolstered by the enthusiasm for O’Casey shown by the American director Paul Shyre. This chapter traces the development of O’Casey’s reputation in the USA, and examines a range of onstage versions of O’Casey’s plays in America, ranging from the introductory work of the 1920s to the 2019 O’Casey season at the Irish Repertory Theater in New York.

Between 1975 and 1992, David Krause edited and then published a comprehensive set of O’Casey’s letters that had not been published before. This chapter focuses on O’Casey’s inventiveness as a letter writer, and shows how he includes a wide and sometimes contradictory assortment of voices in order to make his correspondence vibrant and engaging. Letter-writing enabled O’Casey to project his moods and opinions to recipients who knew him in specific contexts, and such writing reveals his fascinating reactions to public and private events. This chapter addresses the use which O’Casey made of letters, and the complex image of the man which emerges from them.