Oliver St. John Gogarty was a quintessential figure of the Irish literary revival or renaissance. Though he was a satirist of sentimental nationalism, a mocker of the "Gaelicization" of what he regarded as Ireland's Norman heritage, and even a critic of the revival's interest in peasant life and culture (as manifest, for instance, in the plays of J. M. Synge), he was both a product of the revival and a contributor to the intellectual, artistic, and political life of Dublin in its greatest literary period. Indeed, it could be said of Gogarty, more than of his greater contemporaries William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, that, in his character and in his talents, he was the embodiment of Dublin--of its love of talk, its wicked capacity for witty malice, its delight in impulsive gestures, its imaginative vivacity.

Born in Dublin to Dr. Henry Gogarty and Margaret Oliver Gogarty, Oliver...