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| Frank O'Connor (1903-1966) |
Our meeting Monday night takes up Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation," a short story set during the civil war in Ireland during the 1920s. Frank O'Connor (the
nom de plume of Michael O'Donovan) was a combatant in this conflict, and in his first military action was taken prisoner. The story concerns two English soldiers, Hawkins and Belcher, who have been taken hostage. There is a rebel leader named Jeremiah Donovan. Readers with leanings towards literary-biographical interpretations would consider it not a coincidence that Jeremiah is "Donovan" and O'Connor's real name was "O'Donovan," and O'Connor's father, "Big" Mick O'Donovan, was a military man. The text poses a problem to such a reading, however, in that the story's actual narrator is an Irish partisan known simply as "Bonaparte."
The original version of "Guests of the Nation" was published in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1931. It launched O'Connor's career, and his reputation as a short story writer grew over the years in both North America and Ireland. O'Connor was a true man of letters and also wrote novels, autobiography, poetry translations from Gaelic, travel memoirs, and criticism.
