Sean OFaolain

Seán O'Faoláin , 1900-1991, Irish writer. The relation of the individual to society was often the theme of his novels and stories. He frequently wrote about Ireland, analyzing the nation's agony in adjusting past history with present reality. O'Faoláin was probably best known for his short stories, collected in such volumes as Midsummer Night Madness (1932), The Man Who Invented Sin (1948), The Heat of the Sun (1966), and The Talking Trees (1971). Among his novels are A Nest of Simple Folk (1933) and Come Back to Erin (1940). His nonfiction works include biographies of De Valera (1933) and Daniel O'Connell (1938) and several studies of Ireland, notably Song of Ireland (1943) and The Irish (1948).

Bibliography: See study by M. Harmon (1967).

O'Faolain, Sean (1900–91), novelist, short story writer, and commentator. O'Faolain rebelled successively against the deferential loyalism of his Royal Irish Constabulary father and the elegiac Gaelic revivalism of his early mentor Daniel Corkery. He fought in the Anglo‐Irish War (which he saw in retrospect as a struggle of youth for liberation from petty social hierarchies) and on the anti‐treaty side in the Civil War. As an author, he conducted a long‐running conflict with the new state over literary censorship and other intellectual restrictions. From the late 1930s he advanced an interpretation of Irish history emphasizing a decisive discontinuity between the Gaelic‐aristocratic past, destroyed for ever in the 16th century (The Great O'Neill (1942) ), and the modern liberal culture whose first great spokesman was Daniel O'Connell (King of the Beggars (1938) ). This controversial view to some extent echoes earlier disputes between separatists such as Arthur Griffith and purely cultural nationalists such as Corkery's mentor D. P. Moran.

In the 1940s O'Faolain provided an outlet for dissent and social criticism as editor of the Bell. In later life he moved away from polemics to become a cosmopolitan writer dealing with the haute bourgeoisie, accepted by the new establishment of a changed Ireland. He published an autobiography, Vive Moil, in 1964.

Patrick Maume