Introduction

Abstract

Brian Friel was born in Omagh in Co. Tyrone in 1929, the son of a primary school principal. In the same year the family went to live in the Bogside in Derry. He spent five years at St Columb’s College, Derry and, later, two-and-a-half years at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the national seminary near Dublin. Instead of going on for the priesthood, he graduated with a BA and spent a year at St Joseph’s Teacher Training College in Belfast. From 1950 until 1960 he taught in various schools around Derry. Since then he has been writing full-time. Though both he and his father were teachers, his grandparents, he tells us, were illiterate peasants from Co. Donegal whose first language was Irish not English. As Peter Breen notes (in ‘ Place and Displacement in the Work of Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Warwick University, 1993), Friel’s own family background bears the marks of the historical divisions between traditional value and the processes of modernity which characterise the larger Irish and Ulster history.