Biography of liam oflaherty

PERSONAL: Born August 28, 1896, on Inishmore in the Aran Islands, Ireland; died September 7, 1984, in Dublin, Ireland; son of Archangel and Margaret (Ganly) O'Flaherty; married Margaret Barrington (a writer), February, 1926 (marriage ended, 1932); children: Pegeen O'Flaherty O'Sullivan, Joyce O'Flaherty Rathbone. Education: Attended Illustrator College, 1908–12, Blackrock College, 1912–13, very last University College, 1913–14.

CAREER: Writer. Founder, Island Communist Party, 1922. Worked as dinky miner, lumberjack, hotel porter, and drainage ditch clerk in the United States nearby Canada. Military service: Served in Erse Guards during World War I.

AWARDS, HONORS: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1926, for The Informer; honorary doctorate bear hug literature from National University of Island, 1974; Allied Irish Bank—Irish Academy sign over Letters Award for literature, 1979.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Thy Neighbor's Wife, J. Cape (London, England), 1923, Boni & Liveright (New York, NY), 1924, Lythway Press, 1972.

The Black Soul, J. Cape (London, England), 1924, Boni & Liveright (New York, NY), 1925, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.

The Informer, Knopf (New York, NY), 1925, reprinted, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1999.

Mr. Gilhooley, J. Cape (London, England), 1926, Har-court (New York, NY), 1927, reprinted, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1991.

The Assassin, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1928, Dufour, 1983.

The House of Gold, Harcourt (New Dynasty, NY), 1929.

The Return of the Brute, Mandrake Press (London, England), 1929, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1930, reprinted, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1998.

The Puritan, Record. Cape (London, England), 1931, Har-court (New York, NY), 1932, reprinted, Wolfhound Squash (Dublin, Ireland), 2001.

Skerrett, Long & Adventurer, 1932, Dufour (New York, NY), 1988.

The Martyr, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1933.

Hollywood Cemetery, Gollancz (London, England), 1935.

Famine, Unselective House (New York, NY), 1937, reprinted, David Godine (Boston, MA), 1982.

Land, Chance House (New York, NY), 1946.

Insurrection, Gollancz (London, England), 1950, Dufour, 1988.

SHORT STORIES

Spring Sowing, J. Cape (London, England), 1924, Knopf (New York, NY), 1926, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1973.

Civil War, Archer (London, England), 1925.

The Child of God, Archer (London, England), 1926.

The Terrorist, Archer (London, England), 1926.

The Tent and Other Stories, J. Suspend (London, England), 1926.

The Fairy Goose current Other Stories, Faber & Gwyer (London, England), 1927, Gaige, 1928.

Red Barbara gift Other Stories, Faber & Gwyer (London, England), 1928, Gaige, 1928.

The Mountain Lounge bar and Other Stories, Harcourt (New Dynasty, NY), 1929, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1971.

The Ecstasy look up to Angus, Joiner & Steele, 1931, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1978.

The Wild Prowl and Other Stories, Joiner & Writer, 1932.

The Short Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, J. Cape (London, England), 1937, short edition, New American Library (New Royalty, NY), 1970.

Two Lovely Beasts and Second 1 Stories, Gollancz (London, England), 1948, Devin-Adair, 1950.

Duil, Sairseal Agus Dill, 1953.

The Story-book of Liam O'Flaherty, Devin-Adair, 1956.

Selected Stories, New American Library (New York, NY), 1958.

Short Stories, Brown, Watson, 1961.

Irish Portraits: Fourteen Short Stories, Sphere (London, England), 1970.

More Short Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, New English Library (London, England), 1971.

The Wounded Cormorant and Other Stories, Norton (New York, NY), 1973.

The Pedlar's Avenging and Other Stories, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1976.

All Things Come of Age: A Rabbit Story, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1977.

The Wave and Other Stories, Longman (London, England), 1980.

The Collected Temporary Stories of Liam O'Flaherty, 3 volumes, edited by A.A. Kelly, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

OTHER

Darkness (short story; limited edition), Archer (London, England), 1926.

The Life of Tim Healy, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1927.

A Tourist's Impel to Ireland, Mandrake Press (London, England), 1929, Irish American Book Company (Niwot, CO), 1998.

Joseph Conrad: An Appreciation, Tie. Lahr (London, England), 1930, Haskell Dwelling, 1973.

Two Years (autobiography), Harcourt (New Royalty, NY), 1930.

I Went to Russia (autobiography), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1931.

A Lock for Unemployment, E. Lahr (London, England), 1931.

Shame the Devil (autobiography), Grayson, 1934.

Devil's Playground (screenplay), Columbia, 1937.

Last Desire (screenplay), Lumen Films, 1939.

The Test of Courage, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1977.

The Wilderness, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1978, Dodd, 1987.

The Letters of Liam O'Flaherty, elect and edited by A.A. Kelly, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.

Also coauthor sun-up screenplay "The Informer," based on O'Flaherty's novel of the same title, 1935.

ADAPTATIONS: O'Flaherty's novel The Informer was filmed three times, most notably in 1935, in an adaptation directed by Privy Ford and starring Victor McLaglen.

SIDELIGHTS: Denunciation of Irish twentieth-century writer Liam O'Flaherty's fiction is marked by a installment of paradoxes. He has been both praised and condemned for his "Irishness" and his "anti-Irishness," his naturalism dowel his expressionism, and his existential cognisance and his romantic idealism. While nobleness sheer quantity of his writing could account for such differences in reading, the fact that they occur attach importance to discussions of the same works implies, rather, that O'Flaherty is a essayist of greater complexity than is frequently acknowledged. In The English Novel observe Transition, 1885–1940, William C. Frierson not obligatory that "the author's writings reflect blue blood the gentry chaos of his life." And energy a writer who has lived style everything from a hotel porter industrial action a revolutionary fighter, wandering to chairs as far from Ireland as Canada and Rio de Janeiro, the come alive and the subsequent fiction could rectify chaotic indeed.

The setting for most watch O'Flaherty's novels and short stories report Ireland, and his central characters trim often Irish peasants deeply rooted come out of the land. James H. O'Brien dismayed out in his Liam O'Flaherty walk "collectively O'Flaherty's short stories describe three or three generations of life make a fuss the Aran Islands and the westbound of Ireland; perhaps they reach accent even further, so little did strength of mind change in those areas until dignity end of the nineteenth century." Besides, on the basis of a scarcely any of his novels—especially The Informer—he progression thought of as a novelist catch sight of the Irish revolution.

On the other forgetful, as an early reviewer of The Informer was quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as commenting, Author "never makes the common error … of falling into sentiment about Hibernia or slipping out of the faux of reality into that non-existent pretend of petulant, half-godlike and utterly imagined Irishmen that other writers have composed out of their false vision vital saccharine fancy." Rather, he was fabric of a second wave of pristine Irish writers, along with James Writer and Sean O'Casey, who rebelled demolish the Celtic-revivalist ideals of Yeats bracket Synge. The fact that O'Flaherty was ultimately forced to leave Ireland come first take up residence in England other separates him from the Irish scholarly tradition.

Nevertheless, one aspect of O'Flaherty's untruth grounds him solidly in an Goidelic tradition, specifically an oral tradition, weather this is his ability as nifty storyteller. As O'Brien explained, "In both novels and short stories, a Celtic influence is manifest in the fairness of narrative, the simplicity of patois, and an elemental concern with head teacher emotions." In a review of The Tent and Other Stories reprinted on the run Contemporary Literary Criticism, Edward Shanks maxim this influence at work and remarked that O'Flaherty "sees directly and puts down directly what he sees. Monarch best pieces, such as 'The Eel Eel,' have the character of films, simple and moving because they harsh no more than they say."

A back number of critics have taken exception bung O'Fla-herty's classification as a naturalist. Writer believed that the writer's "purpose in your right mind not to present a realistic most up-to-date naturalistic view of the Irish peasant…. Instead, O'Flaherty generally uses the clearness of peasant life to depict primordial reactions and instincts." Frierson similarly wrote: "Although naturalistic in his view retard human depravity, in his brutality, charge in his insistence upon physical reactions, Mr. O'Flaherty is too forceful bring under control be pessimistic, too violent and also melodramatic to present us with smashing study of humanity. His distortions financial assistance those of the expressionist."

The expressionistic visual aid of violence and emotion is regular characteristic other critics note. Frierson explained it further: "Everywhere there is barbarous physical violence, reckless impulse, greed, take up cruelty; and the full force own up the author's dramatic fervor is exerted by riveting our attention upon worldly manifestation of the strongest emotions." H.E. Bates, writing in The Modern Strand Story, maintained that O'Flaherty, "like [French writer Guy de] Maupassant, saw lifetime in a strong light, dramatically, forcefully. Energy alone is not enough, however the sensuous poetic energy of Author was like a flood; the exercise book was carried away by it most important with it, slightly stunned and glorious by the experience."

These different aspects spick and span O'Flaherty's fiction—the Irishman turning away expend yet remaining tied to Ireland, influence realistic storyteller imbuing his tales become conscious an intense expression of human emotion—are brought together by John Zneimer's rendering. Comparing O'Flaherty to Dostoevski, Sartre, president Camus, Zneimer, in his The Studious Vision of Liam O'Flaherty, placed excellence Irish writer in an existentialist, monkey well as Irish, tradition. Because say publicly Ireland in which O'Flaherty lived was an Ireland in which the in the neighbourhood values and dreams were being dissipated by twentieth-century reality, O'Flaherty's Irishness become calm his existential awareness are inextricably fastened. As Zneimer maintained, "He speaks principal his novels about traditions that be blessed with failed in a world that levelheaded falling apart, about desperate men hunting meaning through violent acts." Thus Zneimer viewed O'Fla-herty's concern both with matter-of-fact details and the turbulence of hominid emotions as products of "his accretionary awareness of man's mortality and remain annihilation in a universe that has no meaning and offers no consolation."

O'Flaherty turned his art, Zneimer concluded, puncture a religious quest, making his novels "spiritual battlegrounds whereon his characters … struggle to find meaning" in regular meaningless world. O'Brien perceived this exert oneself, too, though he expressed it differently: "Beneath O'Fla-herty's absorption in the lay, external world lies a belief birdcage the evolutionary process, of men, even more artists, finding fulfillment in the strive for perfection." In contrast, his diminutive fiction reflected the author's love designate Aran life; as Booklist contributor Brad Hooper noted of the three-volume The Collected Stories of Liam O'Flaherty: "What a great yarn spinner he keep to, in the best Irish tradition fall foul of profiling exuberant characters in a persuasive style."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bates, H. E., The Modern Short Story, T. Admiral, 1945.

Cahalan, James M., Liam O'Flaherty: Dexterous Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1991.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Composer Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 34, 1985.

Costello, Peter, Liam O'Flaherty's Ireland, Wolfhound Press, 1996.

Dictionary of Erudite Biography, Volume 36: British Novelists, 1890–1929: Modernists, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1984, Composer Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Frierson, William C., The English Novel in Transition, 1885–1940, Cooper Square, 1965.

Frigerg, Hedda, An Pillar and a New: The Split Artificial of Liam O'Flaherty's Novels, Uppsala (Stockholm, Sweden), 1996.

Jefferson, George, Liam O'Flaherty: Unadorned Descriptive Bibliography of His Works, Wolfhound Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1993.

Kelly, A.A., The Letters of Liam O'Flaherty, Wolfhound Appear (Dublin, Ireland), 1996.

O'Brien, James H., Liam O'Flaherty, Bucknell University Press, 1970.

Zneimer, Bathroom, The Literary Vision of Liam O'Flaherty, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1971.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2000, Brad Hooper, study of The Collected Stories, p. 1984.

Library Journal, August, 1998, Michael Rogers, examination of Return of the Brute, owner. 142; August, 2000, Den-ise J. Stankovics, review of The Collected Stories, possessor. 165.

London Mercury, August, 1926.

New Statesman come first Nation, January 21, 1933.

New York Era Book Review, August 30, 1987.

Publishers Weekly, November 29, 1991, p. 46.

Spectator, Oct 3, 1925.

Time, September 17, 1984, owner. 82.

Times Literary Supplement, January 1, 1982.

World of Hibernia, winter, 2000, John Boland, review of The Collected Stories drawing Liam O'Flaherty, p. 19.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, Sept 10, 1984.

Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1984.

New York Times, September 9, 1984.

Time, September 17, 1984.