Advertisement

Thomas Flanagan

Thomas Flanagan (1923–2002), the grandson of Irish immigrants, grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he ran the school newspaper with his friend Truman Capote. Flanagan attended Amherst College (with a two-year hiatus to serve in the Pacific Fleet) and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under Lionel Trilling while also writing stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 1959, he published an important scholarly work, The Irish Novelists, 1800 to 1850, and the next year he moved to Berkeley, where he was to teach English and Irish literature at the University of California for many years. In 1978 he took up a post at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, from which he retired in 1996. Flanagan and his wife Jean made annual trips to Ireland, where he struck up friendships with many writers, including Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney, whom he in turn helped bring to the United States. His intimate knowledge of Ireland’s history and literature also helped to inspire his trilogy of historical novels, starting with The Year of the French (1979, winner of the National Critics’ Circle award for fiction, reissued by NYRB Classics in 2004) and continuing with The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). He is also the author of There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History (2004). Flanagan was a frequent contributor to many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review.

Western Star

Western Star

Searching for John Ford: A Life

by Joseph McBride

November 29, 2001 issue

Fitzgerald’s ‘Radiant World’

Novels and Stories, 1920-1922

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Trimalchio: An Early Versionof The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West

Trimalchio by F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Facsimile Edition of the Original Galley Proofs

edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli

December 21, 2000 issue

Waking from the Nightmare

Waking from the Nightmare

Breakfast on Pluto

by Patrick McCabe

The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

April 22, 1999 issue

Subscribe and save 50%!

Read the latest issue as soon as it’s available, and browse our rich archives. You'll have immediate subscriber-only access to over 1,200 issues and 25,000 articles published since 1963.

Subscribe now

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in