Frank O'Connor

Frank O’Connor (born Michael Francis O'Connor O'Donovan) (17 September 1903 – 10 March 1966) was an Irish author of over 150 works, who was best known for his short stories and memoirs.

Early life

Raised an only child in Cork, Ireland, to Minnie O'Connor and Michael O'Donovan, O'Connor's early life was marked by his father's alcoholism, indebtness and ill-treatment of his mother. O'Connor's childhood was shaped in part by his mother, who supplied much of the family's income because his father was unable to keep steady employment due to his drunkenness.He was in the balloon making industry.

Irish nationalism

In 1918 O'Connor joined the First Brigade of the Irish Republican Army and served in combat during the Irish War of Independence. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and joined the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War, working in a small propaganda unit in Cork City. He was one of twelve thousand Anti-Treaty combatants who were interned by the government of the new Irish Free State, O'Connor's imprisonment being in Gormanston, County Meath between 1922 and 1923.

Literary career

Following his release, O'Connor took various positions including that of Irish teacher, theatre director, and librarian. In 1935, O'Connor became a member of the Board of Directors of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, founded by William Butler Yeats and other members of the Irish National Theatre Society.^[1] In 1937, he became managing director of the Abbey. Following Yeats's death in 1939, O'Connor's long-standing conflict with other board members came to a head and he left the Abbey later that year.^[2] In 1950, he accepted invitations to teach in the United States, where many of his short stories had been published in The New Yorker and won great acclaim.^[3]

Death

Frank O'Connor had a stroke while teaching at Stanford University in 1961, and later died from a heart attack in Dublin, Ireland on 10 March 1966. He was buried in Deans Grange Cemetery on 12 March 1966.^[4]

Work

O'Connor was perhaps Ireland's most complete man of letters, best known for his varied and comprehensive short stories but also for his work as a literary critic, essayist, travel writer, translator and biographer.^[5] He was also a novelist, poet and dramatist.^[6]

From the 1930s to the 1960s he was a prolific writer of short stories, poems, plays, and novellas. His work as an Irish teacher complemented his plethora of translations into English of Irish poetry, including his initially banned translation of Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán Oíche ("The Midnight Court"). Many of O'Connor's writings were based on his own life experiences — his character Larry Delaney in particular. O'Connor's experiences in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War are reflected in The Big Fellow, his biography of Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins, published in 1937, and one of his best-known short stories, Guests of the Nation (1931), published in various forms during O'Connor's lifetime and included in Frank O'Connor — Collected Stories, published in 1981.

O'Connor's early years are recounted in An Only Child, a memoir published in 1961 which has the immediacy of a precocious diary. U.S. President John F. Kennedy remarked anecdotally from An Only Child at the conclusion of his speech at the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center in San Antonio on November 21, 1963: "Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall--and then they had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it."^[7]

O'Connor continued his autobiography through his time with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which ended in 1939, in his book, My Father's Son, which was published in 1968, after O'Connor's death.

In popular culture

Neil Jordan's award winning film The Crying Game was inspired in part by O'Connor's short story, Guests of the Nation. The story is set during the Irish War of Independence and chronicles the doomed friendship between the members of an I.R.A. unit and the two British Army hostages whom they are guarding.

Bibliography

Incomplete - to be updated

• Guests of the Nation
• My Oedipus Complex
• The First Confession
• An Only Child (autobiography)
• My Father's Son (autobiography)
• The Wild Bird's Nest (translations from the Irish)
• The Little Monasteries (translations from the Irish)
• Kings, Lords, and Commons (translations from the Irish)
• Lament for Art O'Leary (translation from the Irish)
• The Midnight Court (translation from the Irish)
• Christmas Morning
• The Bridal Night
• The Luceys
• The Long Road to Ummera
• The Big Fellow (biography of Michael Collins)
• The Drunkard
• The Saint and Mary Kate
• The Man of the World
• Irish Miles
• The Lonely Voice
• The One Toed Child
• Frank O'Connor — Collected Stories, edited by Richard Ellmann (Knopf 1981)

Short stories

• O'Connor, Frank (15 January 1949). "Darcy in the Land of Youth". The New Yorker 24 (47): 27-31. 

See also

• List of people on stamps of Ireland

References

1. ^ My Father's Son, by Frank O'Connor, Black Staff Press, Belfast, 1968, p. 153.
2. ^ My Father's Son, p. 199.
3. ^ My Father's Son, note on the author, unnumbered
4. ^ Frank O'Connor
5. ^ Frank O'Connor Page
6. ^ Frank O'Connor's Collected Stories, Introduction, Knopf, N.Y., 1981. p. xii
7. ^ The Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass., Speech of Nov. 21, 1963, Dedication of Aerospace Medical Health Center, San Antonio, Tex.

External links

• Biography
• Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
• Beyond Appearances
• Interview with his wife
• The Paris Review Interview
• Irish Writers Online page
• Frank O'Connor at the IMDB