Liam O'Flaherty

Dr. James H. O'Brien

1973
117 pages
ISBN 0-8387-7772-4
Irish Writers Series

Liam O'Flaherty is another contribution to the Irish Writers Series. These monographs have been designed to treat in individual volumes the significant Anglo-Irish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. When complete the series will constitute a significant history of modern Anglo-Irish literature, encompassing discussions of more than 50 writers.

Liam O'Flaherty is best known, perhaps, for his novel The Informer, which was made into an award-winning film. Recently, however, he has been gaining a new reputation among Irish writers for his short stories, brief lyric sketches that dramatize with directness and immediacy the elemental instincts of man. In addition, he is the author of fourteen novels-taut probings of the traumas of the modern age that harass Ireland. He has also demanded our attention in autobiography, especially in Shame the Devil, a study of a writer's struggle to regain his creative power. In all of his works O'Flaherty perceptively describes the Irish peasant in transition from an almost medieval world to a complex twentieth century.

About the author:

Dr. James H. O'Brien is a Professor of English at Western Washington State College.