Alexander Irvine

Irvine, Alexander (1862-1941), novelist; born in Antrim town, his much-loved work, My Lady of the Chimney Corner (1913), deals with the sanctity of his mother, Anna Gilmore. Two sequels, The Souls of Poor Folk (1921) and Anna's Wishing Chair (1937), reflect her gift of story-telling. From the Bottom Up (1914) and A Fighting Parson (1930) are autobiographies relating his own troubled adolescence and young manhood. In 1903 he completed an extramural theology degree at Yale, and helped to organize the American labour movement. In the First World War he served as a padre (an experience recorded in God and Tommy Atkins, 1918).