Frank O'Connor

Frank O'Connor is probably Ireland's best known short story writer. His childhood in Cork was marked by his father's alcoholism, indebtness and ill-treatment of his mother and is brilliantly retold in his memoir An Only Child (1961). O'Connor took the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War and was interned in Gormanstown Internment Camp in 1923 where he met many literary men. His war experiences informed his later critical stance towards the Catholic church and the government during his prolific writing career between the 1930s to the 1960s. Denounced as anti-Irish for his criticism of Irish society, O'Connor saw several of his books banned in Ireland over the years and eventually went into exile in America for most of the 1950s. There he taught at the universitites of Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford and Berkeley. Following his return to Ireland in 1961, he received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College. Frank O'Connor died in Dublin in 1966.