The first comprehensive examination of one of Ireland's leading social novelists of this century. No other Irish novelist has succeeded so completely in rendering rural Irish life as Peadar O'Donnell. From the minutest details of life on tiny islands to the broader sweep of townland life in mainland Donegal, O'Donnell manages to re-create rural Ireland in a deeply intimate and moving way. Gonzalez's “reader's guide” provides the first thorough assessment of O'Donnell's complete literary output, both the fiction and non-fiction. He also places O'Donnell in the context of Irish literature in general, showing how his fiction relates to that of his contemporaries, including George Moore and James Joyce, as well as to that of modern Irish literature in general. His novels, The Knife, about the Civil War, The Big Windows, about rural Donegal, and Islanders, about the poverty and struggles of a small island community, probably provide the most unsentimental and honest portrait of Irish life written by any Irish writer this century. His vision of his homeland is complex and many-layered, affectionate yet unsentimental, and always honest. Alexander G. Gonzalez is Professor of English at Cortland College of the State University of New York and has published extensively on contemporary Irish literature.
