Short Fiction:
Guests of the Nation, 1931
Bones of Contention, and Other Stories, 1936
Crab Apple Jelly, 1944
Selected Stories, 1946
The Common Chord, 1947
Traveller’s Samples, 1951
The Stories of Frank O’Connor, 1952
More Stories, 1954
Stories by Frank O’Connor, 1956
Domestic Relations, 1957
My Oedipus Complex, and Other Stories, 1963
Collection Two, 1964
A Set of Variations, 1969
Collection Three, 1969
Collected Stories, 1981
Long Fiction:
The Saint and Mary Kate, 1932
Dutch Interior, 1940
Drama:
In the Train, pr. 1937 (with Hugh Hunt)
The Invincibles: A Play in Seven Scenes, pr. 1937 (with Hunt)
Moses’ Rock, pr. 1938 (with Hunt)
The Statue’s Daughter: A Fantasy in a Prologue and Three Acts, pr. 1941
Poetry:
Three Old Brothers, and Other Poems, 1936
Nonfiction:
Death in Dublin: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution, 1937
The Big Fellow, 1937
A Picture Book, 1943
Towards an Appreciation of Literature, 1945
The Art of the Theatre, 1947
Irish Miles, 1947
The Road to Stratford, 1948
Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, 1950
The Mirror in the Roadway, 1956
An Only Child, 1961
The Lonely Voice, 1963
The Backward Look: A Survey of Irish Literature, 1967
My Father’s Son, 1968
Translations:
The Wild Bird’s Nest, 1932 (of selected Irish poetry)
Lords and Commons, 1938 (of selected Irish poetry)
The Fountain of Magic, 1939 (of selected Irish poetry)
Lament for Art O’Leary, 1940 (of Eileen O’Connell)
The Midnight Court: A Rhythmical Bacchanalia from the Irish of Bryan Merryman, 1945 (of Brian Merriman’s Cuirt an mheadhoin oidhche)
Kings, Lords, and Commons, 1959 (of selected Irish poetry)
The Little Monasteries, 1963 (of selected Irish poetry)
A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry, 1967 (with David Greene)
Michael Francis O’Donovan, who later took the name Frank O’Connor, was born in 1903, the only child of a poor laborer and a cleaning woman. Some knowledge of O’Connor’s childhood is important for an understanding of his fiction, for he later wrote several of his most memorable stories about his ambiguous relationship with his alcoholic father and his orphaned mother. O’Connor was a sickly and frail misfit among the other boys in the slums, rejected as a sissy and a snob, a child who lived primarily in his fantasy world. He entered St. Patrick’s National School in Cork in 1914, where he met patriot teacher and writer Daniel Corkery, whom both he and his friend Sean O’Faoláin viewed as a literary and political mentor. O’Connor left school in 1917 and joined the Irish Republican Army. He was captured and interned as a rebel in 1923; upon his release, he worked as a librarian for a few years. At this time O’Connor began his life as a writer, took his new name, began to write reviews and poems for the Irish Statesman, and attempted to revive drama in Cork.
Frank O’Connor
This life began to quicken considerably when he left Cork for Dublin to become a librarian there in 1928. During the next ten years, O’Connor worked with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, published his first novel and his first collection of poems, and produced four plays. At the age of thirty-four, he retired from the library, resigned from the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre, and retreated to a small mountain village to begin writing full-time. Although O’Connor (in spite of his relative lack of formal education) wrote poems, plays, novels, travel books, and literary criticism, his place in twentieth century literature is most assured by his work in the short-story genre.
Of the nearly one hundred short stories he wrote, the best known are “Guests of the Nation,” “The Drunkard,” “My Oedipus Complex,” and “First Confession.” The first, published in 1931, when O’Connor was a young man, is a stark and violent story about two British soldiers reluctantly executed by Irish rebels, whereas the other three are hilariously comic stories about the problems of a sensitive child’s relationship with his parents and his first encounter with formal religion.
One of O’Connor’s best-known books is his study of the short-story genre, The Lonely Voice, in which he argues that, as opposed to the novel, the short story takes as its primary subject the experiences of what he calls a “submerged population group,” such as the peasants of Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov and the small-town folk of Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce. For O’Connor, the short story does not deal with human experience within the context of a fully organized social world but rather within the broader and more universal context of Blaise Pascal’s “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” Although most critics agree that O’Connor never perfected the short story to the degree that Joyce did, O’Connor’s profound understanding of the secret of the short story’s inherent difference from the novel, as well as his ability to capture what he called “the Irish middle-class Catholic way of life” in delightful comic vignettes, has assured him a permanent place in the history of twentieth century Irish literature.