Frank O'Connor

“O’Connor was, above all, a short story writer,” Maurice Sheehy proposed in the first extended bibliography of the writer’s work (Sheehy 1969, 168). Criticism over the last fifty years has generally endorsed this claim and has concentrated on O’Connor’s work as a practitioner and critic of the genre. Frank O’Connor (b. 1903–d. 1966) was the author of six volumes of short stories, the first of which, Guests of the Nation, appeared in 1931; his last volume, Domestic Relations, was published in 1957. He edited several collections of his own work, beginning with The Stories of Frank O’Connor in 1952, and additional collections were published posthumously; he was also the author of an influential study of short fiction, The Lonely Voice (1962) (see introduction to O’Connor as Short-Story Writer). Broadly speaking, O’Connor’s stories can be grouped into the following clusters: His stories of the 1930s engage with the fight for Irish independence and the subsequent disappointments of life in the newly emergent Free State; they also explore the uneasy relationship between traditional practices and modernizing values. His stories of the 1940s continue this concern with cultural clashes, intensifying the themes of frustration, provincialism, and loneliness, and dramatizing the power and the habitus of the Catholic Church in Ireland. In the late 1940s, O’Connor began writing for the New Yorker, and the impact of this magazine’s style can be seen in his short fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s; a number of stories from this period are narrated from the perspective of a child, many are nostalgic or whimsical, and some carry an autobiographical element. In addition to his short fiction, O’Connor was a novelist, dramatist, essayist, and literary critic; he had varying levels of success in each of these genres. Largely self-taught, he was fluent in Irish, and he was a distinguished translator of texts from the 7th and 8th centuries through to the modern period; his most famous translations include The Lament for Art O’Leary (1940) and The Midnight Court (1945). He was also a memoirist of note, and his first volume of autobiography, An Only Child (1961) is justly acclaimed. O’Connor wrote under the name “Frank O’Connor” throughout his life; this was a pseudonym of sorts, derived from his middle name (Francis) and his mother’s maiden name (O’Connor). His birth name was Michael O’Donovan.

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