Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic, Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers. Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure as fully human and fallible, while confirming his enormous stature both as a man and a writer. Cronin explores how the sporty schoolboy of solid Protestant bourgeois stock became a prizewinning student at Trinity, flirted with scholarship, and, in Paris, found himself at the center of its literary avant-garde as an intimate friend of James Joyce. But he was a young man who struggled with complexities in his own nature as well as with problems of literary expression. In the small provincial city of Kassel, Germany, the cosmopolitan Beckett experienced a faltering entanglement with his cousin—one of the first in a series of problematic encounters with women. The war years, which he spent as a member of the Resistance and a refugee in the South of France, brought Beckett the self-probings and discoveries that led to the great works. Then, with his sudden and astonishing fame, the balloons of myth began to inflate and a stereotype was born—frozen in exile and enigma, solemnity and sanctity. Anthony Cronin bursts these balloons to see more clearly what lies behind. Without moralizing or psychologizing, without pretensions or piety, he uncovers the real Beckett, the way the life was lived, the way the art was made.

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist

Anthony Cronin

History

Da Capo

Analyzes the writings of Thomas Moore, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and other important figures in the history of the literature of Ireland

Heritage Now: Irish Literature in the English Language

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The Life of Riley

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Faber and Faber

Anthony Cronin has insight to, access to and connections with Beckett's world. Cast from the same mould as Beckett - he too is a word-drunk Irish intellectual - Cronin aims to portray Beckett as both a writer of incomparable gifts and a human being with flaws, dreams and anxieties.

Samuel Beckett : The Last Modernist

Flamingo

Dead as doornails: A chronicle of life

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Calder and Boyars

second-hand but doesnt look like ever read

Letters from the New Island

Colm. Toibin

Mary, Raftery

Poetry

Raven Arts Press

Anthony Cronin's personal anthology: Selections from his Sunday Independent feature

New Island Books

Flann O'Brien's writing career was launched in 1939 with his brilliant first novel AT SWIM TWO BIRDS--a cult classic praised by James Joyce--quickly followed by other influential novels. But O'Brien lived a dark and tragic life, his writing obscured by various pseudonyms. Here Anthony Cronin, a member of O'Brien's intimate circle, offers a remarkable and fascinating portrait of the writer.

No Laughing Matter : The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien

Europe

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Books by Anthony Cronin