Liam O'Flaherty

1
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 mens bones. Swift thought and the
  flight of ravenous birds, and the squeal of
  hunted animals are to me reality. Liam
  OFlaherty

2
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 Irelands
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. 
3

• OFlaherty 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. 

4

• This book is published to mark the centenary of
  Liam OFlahertys 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. 

5

• Liam O'Flaherty died in Dublin in September of
  1984. 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.

6
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