No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien

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Fromm International Pub., 1998 - History - 260 pages
During his all-too-brief lifetime, Flann O'Brien was read by a small but fanatically faithful coterie of readers, including James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, and William Saroyan. He is one of the most difficult writers to pin down, partly or primarily as a result of his having carefully carved himself into three people, all of whom he used, when necessary, to hide behind. As Flann O'Brien he wrote several novels that for their technical precocity, exuberant prose, and sparking invention, have been proclaimed among the finest of the modern period; as Myles na Gopaleen ("Miles of the Little Ponies") he wrote for twenty-five years a wildly imaginative newspaper column for The Irish Times called Cruiskeen Lawn; as Brian O'Nolan, the name on his birth certificate, he held down a responsible job in the bureaucracy of the Irish Government. No Laughing Matter is the first full-length biography of this remarkable man.

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About the author (1998)

Anthony Cronin was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland on December 28, 1923. He was educated at University College Dublin and King's Inns law school. In the 1950s, he was editor of the journal the Bell in Dublin and was later the literary editor of Time and Tide in London. He wrote regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and was a columnist for the Irish Times. He served as cultural and artistic adviser for the prime minister from 1980 to 1983 and again from 1987 to 1992. During his lifetime, he wrote 16 volumes of poetry, two novels including The Life of Riley, a play, several collections of essays, a memoir entitled Dead as Doornails, and two biographies entitled No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. He died on December 27, 2016 at the age of 92.

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