Short Fiction:
Midsummer Night’s Madness, and Other Stories, 1932
A Purse of Coppers, 1937
Teresa, and Other Stories, 1947
The Man Who Invented Sin, and Other Stories, 1948
The Finest Stories of Seán O’Faoláin, 1957
I Remember! I Remember!, 1961
The Heat of the Sun: Stories and Tales, 1966
The Talking Trees, and Other Stories, 1970
Foreign Affairs, and Other Stories, 1976
The Collected Stories of Seán O’Faoláin, 1980-1982 (3 volumes)
Long Fiction:
A Nest of Simple Folk, 1933
Bird Alone, 1936
Come Back to Erin, 1940
And Again?, 1979
Drama:
She Had to Do Something, pr. 1937
Nonfiction:
The Life Story of Eamon De Valera, 1933
Constance Markievicz: Or, The Average Revolutionary, 1934
King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, 1938
An Irish Journey, 1940
The Great O’Neill: A Biography of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, 1550-1616, 1942
The Story of Ireland, 1943
The Irish: A Character Study, 1947
The Short Story, 1948
A Summer in Italy, 1949
Newman’s Way, 1952
South to Sicily, 1953 (pb. in the U.S. as An Autumn in Italy, 1953)
The Vanishing Hero, 1956
Vive Moi!, 1964
Edited Text:
The Silver Branch: A Collection of the Best Old Irish Lyrics Variously Translated, 1938
Seán O’Faoláin (oh-fuh-LAWN) was born on February 22, 1900, in Cork, Ireland, to poor but hardworking parents. His given name was John Francis Whelan, but when he began to sympathize with those who fought for an independent Ireland, he changed it to its Gaelic variant. Living near the Cork Opera House, O’Faoláin got his first taste of theater in his teens, when his parents sublet part of their living quarters to touring actors. According to O’Faoláin, his first sense of it being possible for someone to write about the everyday reality of Irish life came from seeing a performance of Lennox Robinson’s Patriots (1912) when he was fifteen years old. When the Irish began to rebel against the British in 1916, O’Faoláin became a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During his time with the IRA, he met the patriot writer and schoolteacher Daniel Corkery. He and another new friend, Michael O’Donovan (Frank O’Connor), became staunch disciples of Corkery. O’Faoláin became disillusioned, however, when the IRA failed in their efforts to win independence for all of Ireland, and he went to the United States on a fellowship in 1926 to study at Harvard University. While living in Boston, he began his most serious and intense writing about Ireland. It was also while living there that he married Eileen Gould. In 1929, the couple returned to Cork, where O’Faoláin took a teaching job and worked on the stories that were later to appear in his first collection, Midsummer Night’s Madness, and Other Stories.
O’Faoláin soon quit teaching to become a freelance writer, contributing essays and reviews to many journals and newspapers and working on his short stories and his first novel, A Nest of Simple Folk. In 1940, he originated and edited the influential cultural journal The Bell and established a reputation as a social critic. Although in the next several years he published travel books, biographies, and criticism, O’Faoláin’s most lasting work was in the short-story form. In his critical discussions of the short story, O’Faoláin noted that the form thrives best within a romantic framework; the more organized and established a country is, the less likely it is that the short story will flourish there. Ireland, a country that stubbornly sticks to its folk roots, has been a most hospitable place for the short-story form–as O’Faoláin, like his countrymen George Moore, James Joyce, and Frank O’Connor, proved.
Yet O’Faoláin seems to have fought constantly against the romanticism of the short story, yearning for the realism of the novel. Thus his stories reveal a continual battle between his cultural predilection for the short story (with its roots in the folk and its focus on the odd and romantic slant) and his own artistic conviction that realism rather than romanticism is the most privileged artistic convention. Consequently, O’Faoláin’s stories reside uneasily in the dualistic realm of the romanticism to which he was born and the realism for which he yearned. His basic technique might be called “poetic realism,” a kind of prose in which objects and events seem to be presented objectively yet are transformed by the unity of the form itself into meaningful metaphors. There is no doubt that O’Faoláin was a consummate craftsman and a writer with an accurate vision of his country and its people; moreover, he was extremely knowledgeable about the various conventions of the short story and its tradition. O’Faoláin was so knowledgeable, however, that he sometimes seems to be a self-conscious imitator of his more famous precursors. He never found a truly distinctive voice with which to manifest his own individual talent. Although O’Faoláin wrote well in the short-story form, most critics agree that he never achieved the excellence that will make him imitated by future writers.