Autograph letter from Samuel Beckett to Deryk Mendel

Autograph letter from Samuel Beckett to Deryk Mendel

1958

When Dublin Archbishop John Charles McQuaid banned productions of Sean O’Casey’s and James Joyce’s work at a Dublin theater festival, it prompted Beckett to withdraw his own plays and O’Casey to prohibit productions of his work in Ireland during his lifetime. The hegemony of the Catholic Church in the years after independence created, according to novelist John McGahern, “a climate of suppression and poverty and fear.”