J.P. Donleavy

American-Irish · 1926 to 2017

Born James Patrick Donleavy on April 23, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, to Patrick and Margaret Donleavy, Irish immigrants who raised him in the Bronx, Donleavy served in the United States Navy during the Second World War before crossing to Ireland in 1946 on the GI Bill to study bacteriology at Trinity College Dublin. He never finished the degree, drawn instead into a hard-drinking circle of expatriates and Dublin bohemians that included the writer Brendan Behan and the American veteran Gainor Crist, whose reckless, charming misadventures became the raw material for Sebastian Dangerfield, the antihero of The Ginger Man. Donleavy wrote the novel through the early 1950s, and after British and American publishers balked at its sexual candor, it appeared in 1955 from the Paris house Olympia Press, in its notorious Traveller's Companion line of erotica, over Donleavy's own objections to the company it kept. The complete, unexpurgated edition Donleavy always intended did not reach American readers until Delacorte Press published it in 1965, by which point censors in Ireland and the United States had already banned the book for obscenity, a controversy that only sharpened its reputation. The dispute over its rights dragged Donleavy and the Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias through litigation for two decades, and ended only when Donleavy's wife bought Olympia Press itself out of bankruptcy, a settling of accounts Donleavy relished as his final word on the matter. He became an Irish citizen in 1967, and settled permanently in 1972 at Levington Park, a two-hundred-acre estate on Lough Owel in County Westmeath, where he continued writing, painting, and farming for the rest of his life. His later novels, including A Singular Man (1963), The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968), and A Fairy Tale of New York (1973), never matched The Ginger Man's fame, though the book alone sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. Donleavy died at Mullingar, County Westmeath, on September 11, 2017, at the age of ninety-one.