Dead As Doornails: A Memoir - Softcover

In this account of life in post-war literary Dublin, Anthony Cronin writes of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink; the shortage of sex; the insecurity and begrudgery; the limitations of cultural life in mid-century Ireland, and the bittersweet pull of exile.

Originally published in 1976, Anthony Cronin's account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colorful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Flann O'Brien; but, it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life in mid-century Ireland, and the bittersweet pull of exile. We read of a comical sojourn in France with Behan and of Cronin's years in London as a literary editor. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one of wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the extraordinary prose of Dead as Doornails, which has earned its place in Irish literary history alongside the best works of Behan, Kavanagh, and O'Brien.