Brian Friel

D. E. S. Maxwell

1973
110 pages
ISBN 0-8387-7753-8
Irish Writers Series

Brian Friel s 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. These studies will prove helpful to literary scholars and to students of literature. When complete the series will constitute a significant history of modern Anglo-Irish literature, encompassing discussions of more than 50 writers.

Brian Friel began his literary career as a short-story writer, with regular contributions to The New Yorker in the mid-fifties and two books of short stories, The Saucer of Larks in 1962 and The Gold in the Sea in 1966. Then he gave up fiction for drama, and is probably best known for Philadelphia, Here I Come! 91964), which has been produced at the Gaiety Theatre for The Dublin Theatre Festival, on BBC radio, at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York, and at the Lyric Theatre in London. Friel's other plays include The Enemy Within, The Loves of Cass McGuire, Lovers, Crystal Fox, The Mundy Scheme, and The Gentle Island.

Dr. Maxwell says of him in relation to his own Irish contemporary playwrights: "Friel has unquestionably the body of work most distinguished by its substance, integrity, and development, well able to stand with that of his English contemporaries."

About the author:

Desmond Ernest Stewart Maxwell was born in Derry City, Northern Ireland. He has taught at a number of Commonwealth universities and is at present Professor of English and Master of Winters College at York University, Toronto. Among his publications are The Poetry of T.S. Eliot, American Fiction, Cozzens, Melville, and Poets of the Thirties.