The prospects for pursuing a literary career in the censorious moral climate of mid-twentieth-century Ireland were seriously circumscribed. Literature was a key target of the draconian censorship laws passed by the government of the Irish Free State and there were few opportunities and outlets for young aspiring writers, many of whom were forced (in time-honoured fashion) to seek fulfilment of their ambitions abroad. For centuries, London had provided Irish writers with a potentially international market for their work. As a global hub of theatre and publishing, and by 1945 more physically accessible than hitherto, it became the favoured choice of destination for most migrant Irish writers of the time. Members of the London Irish artistic and intellectual community were often already known to each other, having met in Dublin in pubs like McDaid' and the Palace Bar or drinking dens such as the legendary Catacombs. As a result of this, there emerged a close circle of writers in London who cultivated a certain critical and ironic distance from the Irish literary establishment back home. For this new generation, the authority of the author had, in the wake of modernism, become seriously destabilized. This was best exemplified in Ireland by the appearance of Flann O'Brien' influential comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), in which the characters rebel against their author. As part of this reaction, the iconic figure of ‘the Irish writer in exile’, best represented by Yeats and Joyce, was considered a legitimate target for satire.