Frank O'Connor
1903 - 1966
Frank O'Connor, the pen name of Michael O'Donovan, was born in Cork, in 1903. His family's poverty forced him to leave school aged fourteen. He served in the Irish Republican Army during the civil war. The defeat of the IRA and the division of Ireland greatly disappointed O'Connor, feelings which are reflected in his first collection of stories Guests of the Nation (1931).
In the 1930s, O'Connor became director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, during which time he also wrote several plays and a biography of Michael Collins, The Big Fellow (1937). O'Connor published several collections of short stories during his lifetime and several others have been published posthumously, including Collected Stories (1981), The Collar: Stories of Irish Priests, (1993), and A Frank O'Connor Reader (1994). O'Connor was also a noted literary critic and translator of Irish poetry into English. He has written two volumes of autobiography An Only Child (1961) and My Father's Son (1968)