Liam O'Flaherty “I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sunbaked lands where there is no frost in men’s bones. Swift thought and the flight of ravenous birds, and the squeal of hunted animals are to me reality.” Liam O’Flaherty

LIAM O’ FLAHERTY was a child of the nineteenth century, and a man of the twentieth. Born in rural poverty, he died in urban comfort. Passionate in his love of nature, he abhorred everything brutish in man. An exquisite writer of short stories about man and beast on Ireland’s western seaboard, ironically he is best known for The Informer, his novel of squalid Communist intrigue in the back streets of Dublin (thanks largely to the famous film version by his cousin John Ford). Yet Famine, calmly dispassionate on the horrors of the Great Hunger, is regarded by all his readers as his greatest work. He was a man with a divided nature; even the Gaelic language of his childhood village was not the language his father wanted in the home. Solitary, he tried for many years to gain a foothold in crowded Hollywood. An individualist to the core, spontaneous and restless, by inclination a wanderer, he espoused the fervent Communism so typical of those early twentieth-century writers who were filled with generosity and purity of heart. Yet it was a cause that failed him, as it did so many other admirers of Lenin and Trotsky. In touch to his nerve ends with the tides and eddies of creation, he loathed with great bitterness all organised religion, yet spent years studying for the priesthood. In the end he died with the blessing of a priest, reconciled with God if not with the institution he had so long rejected.

O’Flaherty was a strange, often contradictory man, unique among his contemporaries in Irish literature. In his writings we can see the beginnings of much that is now being done in both Gaelic and Irish literature. Though often neglected in the sweep of modern Anglo-American criticism, he was widely appreciated on the continent; and his own love of France and admiration for Russian literature suggest that he was more truly a European writer. From the dying remnants of an ancient culture, from the shattered fragments of a modern life, he composed the unities of his art.

This book is published to mark the centenary of Liam O’Flaherty’s birth. It is intended to provide, through biographical commentary and extracts from his stories and novels, together with appropriate illustrations, a recreation of his varied experiences and his divided imaginative world. More than a decade after his death, it may also introduce him to new and to younger readers.

Liam O'Flaherty died in Dublin in September of After his death, many of his works were re- released as well as some of his letters. Today, Liam O'Flaherty is remembered as a profound writer of the twentieth century by those who have been exposed to him and his work. Liam O'Flaherty is also remembered as strong voice in Irish culture.

Famine Famine is the story of three generations of the Kilmartin family set in the period of the Great Famine of the 1840s. A `masterly historical novel', rich in language, character and plot, a panoramic story of passion, tragedy and resilience. `O'Flaherty is one of the most heroic of Irish novelists, the one who has always tackled big themes, and in this great novel, succeeded in writing something imperishable... Mary Kilmartin (the heroine) has been singled out by two generations of critics as one of the great creations of modern literature. And so she is.’ From review by novelist John Broderick, Irish Times