The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution

Out of print for decades, this is the classic literary biography of one of Ireland's greatest and most charismatic leaders, by one of its greatest authors. In 1916, a young man named Michael Collins returned to his native Ireland, after ten years in voluntary exile in London, to join Irish laborers, clerks, teachers, doctors, and poets in one of the most impassioned and complicated revolutions in history. Playfully nicknamed "The Big Fellow, " Collins began to take a key role in the uprisings, eventually becoming a revered revolutionary leader. Frank O'Connor, one of the world's most acclaimed writers and a man who himself fought in the Irish Civil War, traces Collins's life from the day he returned to Dublin to the day a young Irish soldier shot him dead on a country road.