Anthony Cronin
Cronin, Anthony (1928- ), poet and novelist. Born in Wexford and educated at UCD, he was part of the Dublin literary scene which he chronicled in Dead As Doornails (1976). In 1980 he became cultural adviser to the Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey and created Aos Dána, an affiliation of artists set up in 1983. A comic novel, The Life of Riley (1964), deals with Irish literary Bohemia in the 1940s. Identity Papers (1979) concerns the career of a young man who re-enacts Richard Pigott's treachery until he finds that he is not his descendant. Cronin's poetry, collected in 1973 and again in 1982, is modernist and acerbic though rooted in ordinary experience. R.M.S. Titanic (1967) deals with human and technological crisis. The End of the Modern World (1989) is a sonnet suite dealing with history, sexuality, and decadence. Relationships (1994) is a reflective collection dealing with conscience, while The Minotaur (1999) confronts human violence and love. Criticism includes A Question of Modernity (1966) and Heritage Now (1982). No Laughing Matter (1989) is a biography of Flann O'Brien, and The Last Modernist (1997) of Beckett.
