The Autobiography: An Only Child and My Father's Son

Autobiography of Frank O'Connor #1-2

by Frank O'Connor

Frank O’Connor’s acclaimed autobiography, now in one volume

When Frank O’Connor was born, his parents—Minnie O’Connor, a former maid raised in an orphanage, and Michael O’Donovan, a veteran of the Boer War and the drummer in a local brass-and-reed band—lived above a sweet-and-tobacco shop in Cork, Ireland. The young family soon moved, however, to a two-room cottage at the top of Blarney Street, a lane that originates, as O’Connor so vividly describes it, “near the river-bank, in sordidness, and ascends the hill to something like squalor.” From this unlikely beginning, a poor boy born Michael Francis Xavier O’Donovan set out on the remarkable journey that transformed him into Frank O’Connor, one of Ireland’s greatest writers.

An Only Child, the first installment of O’Connor’s wonderfully evocative autobiography, captures the joy and pain of his early years: joy in the colorful people and places of Cork and in his devoted relationship with his mother, pain in the family’s impoverished situation and in his father’s melancholy moods and drunken outbursts. Fifteen years old when he joins the Irish Republican Army in the fight for independence, O’Connor finds himself on the losing side of the ensuing civil war and is imprisoned by the government of the new nation. My Father’s Son begins with his release from an internment camp and follows him to Dublin and the world-renowned Abbey Theatre, where he meets W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and other members of the Irish Literary Revival, and takes the first steps toward becoming one of the twentieth century’s most beloved authors.

As richly detailed and eloquent as the best of his short fiction, Frank O’Connor’s autobiography is an entertaining portrait of a fascinating time and place, and the inspiring account of a young artist finding his voice.

Genres: Ireland, Nonfiction, Memoir

478 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 10, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Frank O’Connor (born Michael Francis O'Connor O'Donovan) was an Irish author of over 150 works, who was best known for his short stories and memoirs. Raised an only child in Cork, Ireland, to Minnie O'Connor and Michael O'Donovan, his early life was marked by his father's alcoholism, indebtness and ill-treatment of his mother.

He was perhaps Ireland's most complete man of letters, best known for his varied and comprehensive short stories but also for his work as a literary critic, essayist, travel writer, translator and biographer.[5] He was also a novelist, poet and dramatist.[6]

From the 1930s to the 1960s he was a prolific writer of short stories, poems, plays, and novellas. His work as an Irish teacher complemented his plethora of translations into English of Irish poetry, including his initially banned translation of Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán Oíche ("The Midnight Court"). Many of O'Connor's writings were based on his own life experiences — his character Larry Delaney in particular. O'Connor's experiences in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War are reflected in The Big Fellow, his biography of Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins, published in 1937, and one of his best-known short stories, Guests of the Nation (1931), published in various forms during O'Connor's lifetime and included in Frank O'Connor — Collected Stories, published in 1981.

O'Connor's early years are recounted in An Only Child, a memoir published in 1961 but which has the immediacy of a precocious diary. U.S. President John F. Kennedy quoted from An Only Child in his remarks introducing the American commitment to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Kennedy described the long walks O'Connor would take with his friends and how, when they came to a wall that seemed too formidable to climb over, they would throw their caps over the wall so they would be forced to scale the wall after them. Kennedy concluded, "This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it."[7] O'Connor continued his autobiography through his time with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which ended in 1939, in his book, My Father's Son, which was published in 1968, after O'Connor's death.

Reviews

[Mandy]

The first volume of Frank O’Connor’s autobiography takes the reader back to his childhood in Cork, his involvement in the Irish Civil War and the beginnings of his career as a writer. The second volume follows his personal and professional life, and remained unfinished at this death. I didn’t enjoy the second volume as much, and it may be that had he had the opportunity to edit it he may have tightened up the writing. Nevertheless, the two volumes taken together are a fascinating account of his life, not least because he crossed paths with so many of the great and good in Irish cultural life. The portrait of a man in his time and place is evocative, detailed and, being from the pen of such a talented writer, extremely well-written. Required reading for anyone who enjoys O’Connor’s short stories as well as anyone interested in Irish culture, history and politics.

[Michael D]

An essential read for anyone interested in Ireland during the revolutionary years - and a beautifully written family memoir also.