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O'Brien, Flann (1911–1966)| Irish humorist, novelist, and essayist. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he was educated in Dublin, where he later worked as a civil servant. He wrote in Irish Gaelic and English, and his exuberant style is a blend of seriousness, surrealism, and farce. For 30 years he was a brilliant columnist on the Irish Times under the pen name Myles na Gopaleen. His first novel, the ambitious, exploratory At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), was influenced by James Joyce and is also indebted to Gaelic comic tradition. The Third Policeman (1967), written in 1940, is an experimental work with fantastic and satirical elements. |
| An Béal Bocht/The Poor Mouth (1941) was the only novel he produced in Gaelic. Other works include The Hard Life (1961) and The Dalkey Archive (1964). A selection of his newspaper columns appeared posthumously in The Best of Myles (1968). |
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| As part of Dublin's literary scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, much of which revolved around pubs and drinking, O'Faolain's circle included Mary Lavin, John McGahern, Patrick Kavanagh, Leland Bardwell, Myles na Gopaleen (Brian O'Nolan), Louis MacNeice, Seamus Deane and Anthony Cronin. Whether by happenstance or design, while the Abbey was presenting Boucicault's Myles-na-Coppaleen upstairs, the Peacock Theatre downstairs--the Abbey's experimental wing--was mounting an adaptation of At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O'Brien, better known by the nom de plume Myles Na Gopaleen (a variation of Boucicault's spelling), whose Irish Times column, "Cruiskeen Lawn" was the "Doonesbury" of its time. O'Brien, a novelist and satirist, was actually three in one--an entity the novelist Dermot Bolger has called "that wondrous multi-layered mind which singularly comprised the Unholy Trinity of Flann O'Brien, Brian O'Nolan and Myles na Gopaleen. |
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