My Father's Son

My Father's Son begins where the author's acclaimed previous memoir, An Only Child, left off -- with Frank O'Connor, at twenty-three, coming out of the internment camp where he had been imprisoned as an Irish revolutionary, and plunging into the burgeoning intellectual-political ferment of Dublin in the 1920s. In this book, the last O'Connor wrote, he re-creates his years as a young writer, providing as he does so a magnificent portrait of an era.

The excitement of the Irish literary renaissance is made immediate as O'Connor tells of his friend, the poet George Russell, who encouraged him and was the first to publish his work, and of his participation in the triumphs and rivalries of the Abbey Theatre. Here, beautifully rendered, are playwrights Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Lennox Robinson, and Sean O'Casey. Central to the book -- as he was to O'Connor's life and work -- is the complex and majestic figure of William Butler Yeats.