Frank O’Connor

(1903 - 1966)

Born Michael Francis Xavier O’Donovan in Cork, Ireland, in 1903, the writer as a young man joined the Irish Republican Army in 1918 and was arrested in 1922 for opposing the British peace that established the Irish Free State. He published his first writing under the name Frank O’Connor in 1925, soon befriending W.B. Yeats and becoming involved in the world of theater—writing, producing, and directing. The New Yorker published almost fifty stories by O’Connor between 1945 and 1961. He died in Dublin in 1966.