Seán Ó Faoláin

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O'Faolain, Sean (1900-1991), man of letters. Born John Whelan in Cork city, into a family recently moved from the country. His father was a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, while his mother ran a boarding house in Half Moon Street catering for artists working at the nearby Opera House. He was educated by the Presentation Brothers and was influenced by Daniel Corkery, who cultivated his literary interests but whose cultural politics he later repudiated. In 1918 he entered UCC and became involved in the Republican movement. As a member of the Gaelic League, he visited the West Cork Gaeltacht, taking cycling holidays with the slightly younger Frank O'Connor. During these expeditions he met his future wife, Eileen Gould (O'Faoláin). O'Faolain's childhood and formative years are described in his autobiography Vive Moi (1964). It recounts how he took the Republican side in the Civil War, becoming a director of propaganda for the IRA. He returned to studies and took an MA at Harvard on a Commonwealth scholarship, 1926-9, marrying in Boston in 1928. A period was spent teaching at Strawberry Hill College in England before his return to Ireland as a writer in 1933. O'Faolain's early fiction arises from these experiences. Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories (1932) draws on the initial romance of and later disillusionment with nationalist revolutionary activity. In the next phase, with a series of historical novels, A Nest of Simple Folk (1934), Bird Alone (1936), and Come Back to Erin (1940), he constructed a family saga extending from the Fenian Rising to the War of Independence and the years following. His fictional studies of idealism were paralleled by biographies of political figures in Eamon de Valera (1933, 1939); The King of the Beggars (1938), a life of Daniel O'Connell; and The Great O'Neill (1942), a life of Hugh O'Neill. In Newman's Way (1952) he found an opportunity to develop his own conception of a liberal tradition of Catholicism. The Irish (1948), a study of national character, brought together many of his ideas on tradition, culture, and the modern intellectual. His second volume of stories, A Purse of Coppers (1937), reflects the bleak conditions of life in Ireland in the 1930s. In Teresa and Other Stories (1947) and The Man Who Invented Sin (1949), a detached yet human perspective on Ireland emerges. In these and subsequent volumes (I Remember, I Remember, 1948; The Heat of the Sun, 1966; The Talking Trees, 1971; and Foreign Affairs, 1976) technique becomes more assured as moral awareness deepens. From 1940 to 1946 O'Faolain edited The Bell, the literary journal he founded, commissioning articles of a documentary and social nature while analysing aspects of contemporary life and thought in his editorials, which frequently lashed out against the cultural and religious climate of a period still dominated by the Censorship Act of 1928. His polemical hostility to traditionalism is evident in his impatience with the Catholic and Gaelic ideal of Ireland, and in his attacks on his mentor Daniel Corkery's attempt to formulate a criterion for literary value based on cultural identity. The Collected Stories appeared as three volumes (1980-2).

Bibliography

Maurice Harmon, Sean O'Faolain: A Life (1994).

Seán Proinsias Ó Faoláin (22 February 1900 – 20 April 1991) was an Irish short story writer. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1986.

Born as John Francis Whelan in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland, Sean Ó Faoláin wrote his first stories in the 1920s. Through 90 stories, written over a period of 60 years, Ó Faoláin charts the development of modern Ireland. His Collected Stories were published in 1983, eight years before his death on 20 April 1991, in Dublin.

Ó Faoláin was educated at the Presentation Brothers Secondary School in Cork. He fought in the War of Independence. He received M.A. degrees from the National University of Ireland and from Harvard University, was a Commonwealth Fellow from 1926 to 1928 and a Harvard Fellow from 1928 to 1929.

He served as director of the Arts Council of Ireland from 1957 to 1959, and from 1940 to 1946 he was a founder member and editor of the Irish literary periodical The Bell. The list of contributors to The Bell included many of Ireland's foremost writers, among them Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Connor and Brendan Behan.

Family Life

Ó Faoláin married Eileen Gould, a children's writer, in 1929. Their daughter Julia O'Faolain (b. 1932) is a Booker-nominated novelist and short-story writer. Their son Stephen was born in 1938.

Books

• Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories (1932, short stories)
• A Nest of Simple Folk (1933, novel)
• Bird Alone (1936, novel)
• The Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone (1937, biography)
• A Life of Daniel O'Connell (1938, biography)
• An Irish Journey (1940)
• Come Back to Erin (1940, novel)
• The Great O'Neill (1942, biography, of Hugh O'Neill)
• The Irish: A Character Study (1947)
• The Man Who Invented Sin (1948, short stories)
• The Short Story (1948, literary criticism)
• Newman's Way: The Odyssey of John Henry Newman (1952)
• An Autumn in Italy (1953, travel)
• Vive moi! (1964, memoir)
• The Heat of the Sun, Stories and Tales (1966, short stories)
• The Talking Trees (1971, short stories)
• Foreign Affairs, and Other Stories (1976, short stories)
• Selected Stories (1978, short stories)
• And Again? (1979, novel)
• Collected Stories of Sean O'Faolain I (1980, short stories)

Resources

• Register of the Seán O'Faoláin papers, 1926-1969

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