Word: faolain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Vanishing Hero is a promising-looking book. Subtitled "Studies in the Novelists of the Twenties," it is a series of short, incisive chapters on eight English and American writers who generally make fine grist for critical mills. Sean O'Faolain, the author, is a man who has demonstrated a conspicuous and sensitive intelligence in a wide variety of fields...
...therefore, not a little surprising to discover in Sean O'Faolain a good humored Irishman. He sees the breathing corpses which Joyce portrayed in Dubliners, the scarecrows and fairies with whom Yeats identified, the fools and buffoons whom Shaw cauterized. But this vision of the lover does not move him to the usual nausea or lamentation, but instead to reform...
...this description of these short stories a reviewer can only add that O'Faolain underestimates the results of his own work. He has not satirized Ireland; he has defined it so clearly that you may begin to believe that this is Ireland talking, not the author...
...Irishman, however eloquent, can have any confidence that he will not be interrupted by another eloquent Irishman, Irish writers are at their best when they keep it short. O'Flaherty shares mastery of the short story form with fellow countrymen Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and Joyce of The Dubliners...
...talents are undeniable," writes Sean O'Faolain, "but so far they have not produced a play without the stamp of the workshop on it." The same can be said of O'Casey's autobiography. Most of its long and lyrical passages of proletarian praise are marked chiefly by what Stephen Potter might call prosemanship. Here & there are real gems of observation and poetic imagination. But when O'Casey declares that he would like 1,000 years of life "to encircle [the peoples of the world] with his arms like a girdle encircling the waist...