Flann O'Brien

Irish · 1911 to 1966

Born Brian O'Nolan on October 5, 1911, in Strabane, County Tyrone, the third of twelve children of a customs officer with quiet republican sympathies who moved his family across Ireland and Scotland as duty required, he was largely home-schooled until his father was assigned permanently to Dublin. At University College Dublin he wrote for the student magazine under the alias Brother Barnabas, composing in 1934 a story titled Scenes in a Novel in which the author finds his characters declining to follow his design. The idea seeded At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), published under the pen name Flann O'Brien, a novel of nested stories in which a Dublin student writes a book whose characters drug their author and stage a revolt against him. Joyce, in Paris and nearly blind, called him a real writer with the true comic spirit. The Third Policeman, finished in 1940, was rejected by Longmans; humiliated, O'Brien told friends he had lost the manuscript, kept it in a sideboard, and let it sit there until it was published posthumously in 1967. He spent his working life as a senior civil servant in the Department of Local Government in Dublin, and under the third pen name Myles na gCopaleen wrote the Cruiskeen Lawn column in The Irish Times for twenty-six years, in English and Irish, conducting the most sustained campaign of comic ridicule the city had ever read. His Irish-language novel An Béal Bocht (1941) lampooned the Gaelic-revival memoir. He died on April 1, 1966, in Dublin of throat cancer, aged fifty-four, having survived a long unhappy marriage to drink and the bottle.