Daniel Corkery

George Brandon Saul

1973
65 pages
ISBN 0-8387-7754-6
Irish Writers Series

Daniel Corkery 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.

Daniel Corkery (1878-1964) was the author of several plays, short stories, poetry, essays, reviews, tracts, and one novel, as well as a painter in watercolor and Professor of English (University College, Cork). Of his first collection of stories, A Munster Twilight, Dr. Saul writes that "it would be almost impossible to overpraise this charming, quiet, and unaffected book."

Corkery's play The Labour Leader was produced by the Abbey theatre in 1919, The Yellow Bittern the year following, and Fohnam the Sculptor in 1939. Some critics consider his novel, The Threshold of Quiet, as his best work, but Dr. Saul prefers the short stories, not only of A Munster Twilight but of The Stormy Hills, which he describes as "a remarkable collection of exceptional, in several cases superlative, tales." It was in his short stories and a few plays, considers Dr. Saul, that Daniel Corkery "really honored Ireland and his heritage."

About the author:

Born in Shoemakersville, Pa., of Irish and Pennsylvania-Dutch stock, George Brandon Saul earned his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, and is Professor Emeritus of English and the University of Connecticut. He has done research in Ireland and has won several prizes for his poetry, but the bulk of his scholarly writing has been devoted to Anglo-Irish literature and post-Victorian poetry. He has been editor of The Age of Yeats and Owls' Watch (short stories), has contributed to Collier's Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and has been widely anthologized. Author of almost forty books and several hundred poems, articles, reviews, plays, and short stories, he is also a composer for the piano. Dr. Saul has two sons, one daughter, and five grandchildren.