Donleavy, J(ames) P(atrick) (1926– )

US-born Irish writer. His novels, which are about eccentrics, have a fierce comic energy. His picaresque masterpiece The Ginger Man (published in France in 1955) was banned in Ireland, the UK, and the USA until the 1960s. Later novels include A Singular Man (1963), The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman (1977), Leila: Further in the Life and Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman (1983), Are You Listening Rabbi Löw (1987), That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman (1994), and Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton (1998).

Donleavy was born in New York, the son of Irish immigrants. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and became an Irish citizen in 1967. The controversial The Ginger Man, set in Dublin in the 1940s, is the story of Sebastian Dangerfield, a US expatriate; his later work The History of the Ginger Man (1994) is part autobiography, part literary history.