Books: O'Casey at the Bat

SUNSET AND EVENING STAR (339 pp.)—Sean O'Casey—Macmillan ($4.75).

Sean O'Casey is a literary salmon who splashed out of a Dublin slum, leaped the rapids of poverty, and has never stopped swimming stubbornly upstream to spawn his silvery prose. Sunset and Evening Star is the sixth and final volume of his lively, third-person autobiography. With cantankerous, merry and garrulous gusto, the 74-year-old O'Casey evokes the great shades of Irish letters—Yeats, Shaw, Joyce—without fully clinching his eventual right to join them. But "bad or good, right or wrong, O'Casey's always himself," probably the world's greatest living...