"I saw life through a veil of literature." This statement in his autobiography defines something important about Frank O'Connor. After writing, reading was his most consuming activity. He read without method or grace, because he was both a writer and a self-taught person. Since he knew what he liked and disliked, he seldom hedged his bets. Thus, when he wrote about literature he often seemed too opinionated, too flamboyant. But as Richard Ellmann has noted, O'Connor "thoug...

[Some] of O'Connor's public experiences, first in the guerilla war and then in the Civil War, serve as a clear inspiration to some sixteen stories, most of which appear in his collection Guests of the Nation. In these stories, he argues the meaning of these experiences, seeking to express, artistically, the reaction of his countrymen to the agonies at the birth of their nation. This collection, O'Connor carefully notes, was originally written "under the influence of the great Jew...

The violence and idealism of the events of 1916 to 1923 created in Ireland a mood of national hysteria. At least that was the voice heard by O'Connor trying to capture those events in prose six years after. In fact, the two extremes between which Guests of the Nation vacillates are hysteria and melancholy, between thoughtless act and numbed thoughtfulness. Benedict Kiely detected in these stories a "genuine bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive romanticism," an adolescent enjoyment of t...

In 1922 [O'Connor], with O'Faolain, took the Republican side in the Civil War, and his early stories, like O'Faolain's, are based on those experiences. Unlike O'Faolain's, however, O'Connor's lack the somewhat cynical objectivity which the theme demanded. Next we find him interned. The Internment Camp was for him the equivalent of a university. There among his fellow internees were to be found a number of men with questioning minds…. O'Co...

A reader of Frank O'Connor's stories notices at once their atmosphere of warm intimacy. His concern with human contact originates in his sense of human isolation and it pervades his work; characters continuously touch each other, lie in bed discussing their problems or fall in love, and the narrative itself reflects a lively compassion which gives these stories their distinctive relevance. (p. 28) His perceptions of emptiness lead him to seek an intensification of life. He delights in sheer an...

At the time of his death in 1966, Frank O'Connor was generally regarded as an authority on the short story and one of the century's foremost practitioners of the genre. O'Connor's subjects are indeed many and varied; but a student of his entire canon cannot fail to be impressed with the extent to which he concerned himself with the Irish Revolution of 1916–1923. What is perhaps most surprising is that his interest in the conflict was not confined to his first book (which d...

O'Connor was never at home in [the 20th century]. He read Proust, Lawrence and Joyce, but with the admiration that is consistent with suspicion and a determination to go his own way. Modernism interested him as something to keep well way from. He distrusted every technique except the ones he inherited from the 19th-century masters and, according to his own light, practiced. He never doubted that reality was what his eyes and ears told him it was. He did not think that memory and imagination were one ...

Attempting to explain the Irish affinity for the short story, critics have been overly fond of the shanachie. Thus the potato-headed condescension from Charles Poore decorating the jacket of Frank O'Connor's Collected Stories: "One of the great Irish storytellers…." Not so. Though O'Connor often read his stories over Irish national radio, he was one of the great Irish story writers, a compulsive and even finicky craftsman who put a ten-page tale through thirty or fo...

Most of the stories in [Domestic Relations] appeared originally in the New Yorker, where they served to confound those who criticize that magazine's fiction as a monolithic agglomeration of memoirs of dull and surly childhoods…. Mr. O'Connor, to be sure, is fond of recalling his own childhood, but he does it with enough verve and enough sense of "story" to make it palatable. In many ways Mr. O'Connor is a natural New Yorker writer. He is urbane and witty and he inst...

Frank O'Connor belongs with William Carleton, Sheridan Le Fanu, James Stephens, George Moore, Somerville and Ross—Irish writers who achieved their greatest distinction with their short stories…. What is it about this fictional form that so profitably attracts the Irish? Since the work of Frank O'Connor lies at the very heart of the modern story in Ireland, it is a question that may at least be dwelt upon before turning to [his Collected Stories]…. [The short story] is the ...

The earliest story in The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland goes back to 1926; the latest—"The Grip of the Geraghtys"—is the one O'Connor was working on when he died. What's immediately striking about all of them [in this group of previously uncollected stories] is a kind of narrative vigour and flamboyance; no more than two or three are downcast and restrained, and even these have wrought-up moments…. The title story's exuberance is tempered with rue...

The first volume of Frank O'Connor's autobiography (An Only Child, 1961) was the story of young Michael Francis O'Donovan…. That story began in the back lanes of Cork in 1903 and ended with the young man's release, courtesy of the Irish Free State, from an internment camp in 1923. This second, posthumous volume [My Father's Son] picks up the story at that point and brings it forward in time, though with no apparent regard for chronology, to the eve of the Second Wor...

In ["Domestic Relations"] Frank O'Connor proves once again his extraordinary mastery of the short-story form. As always, the settings, the characters, the rhythms of the prose, are unmistakably—and delightfully—Irish. Yet, fundamentally, these are not Irish stories. O'Connor is concerned with those critical moments when the course of life is suddenly, often radically, changed, when nothing is ever quite the same again. In such moments as these it is the human condit...

There is a sensitive tenderness in Mr. O'Connor's ["The Saint and Mary Kate"] that overrides its patches of irony. Likewise, because of his skillful use of indirection, he is able to portray that melodrama and extravagance so apparent in many Irish lives without being himself melodramatic. The background of his novel is a tenement in the town of Cork that bulges with the sorrows and pitifulness of the poor. The two principal characters are Mary Kate and Phil, whose hopeful youth ...

[Mr. O'Connor] has little or none of the professional Irishman in him or of the brothiness, feyness, sentimentality, that mar so much of Irish writing. At his best he is more truthful, lucid and substantial than any other Irish realist now writing and in … [An Only Child, his autobiography,] his talent is sure. His story is by turns painful, hard, tragic, comical and sardonic. It is remarkable throughout for the portrait of his mother….

There is an Irish lilt to the dialogue and an Irish color to the scenery of Frank O'Connor's stories, even at their most melancholy, which, because it gives them a dimension of the strange, also acts to give them literary dimension. But emptied of local color, the stories in "Crab Apple Jelly" don't at all carry, for me, the weight that others have felt in them. I find them sweetly sad, sadly suggestive, or even a touch frightening at moments, but never more than in the wa...