The Revival's Legacy
The writers of the Irish Literary Revival carved out a national identity for the people of Ireland and its new republic, and in doing so left a long legacy for both Irish and international literature. The first writers who followed in the Revival’s wake had particularly innovative voices and verve, from Patrick Kavanagh (poetry) and Flann O’Brien (fiction) to Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett (theater). A later generation of writers following World War II included Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. They were openly aware of the debt they owed those writers who had helped forge the character of a nation, yet they often pushed back against gender and class mythologies of the Revival, all while addressing the complexities of both the hegemony of the Catholic Church and the Troubles that brought violence to the island starting in the 1970s. The global standing of Irish literature has continued to grow, with wide international success for contemporary writers such as John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Sally Rooney, Claire Keegan, and Colm Tóibín.
Flann O’Brien. At Swim-Two Birds. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939.
Inscribed: “To me ould friend P.C. with kind regards in memory of happy days from the Author Brian O’Nolan 14/7/39 and with love from all at Number Four.”
Flann O’Brien, the pen name of Brian O’Nolan, published only a few books in his lifetime, yet he is widely considered one of the great postmodernist Irish novelists of the twentieth century. At Swim-Two Birds received praise from Graham Greene and James Joyce, and The Third Policeman, published posthumously, has become a cult classic. O’Brien worked as a civil servant and as a journalist, for years writing a highly-acclaimed humor column under the name Myles na Gopaleen. A heavy drinker like his friends Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, he died in 1966 at the age of fifty-four.
Autograph letter from Brendan Behan to Gainor Christ, January 30, 1958.
Playwright, storywriter, and memoirist, Brendan Behan was one of Ireland’s most original and notorious postwar literary personalities. He received wide acclaim for his plays The Quare Fellow and The Hostage as well as his memoir-novel Borstal Boy in 1958, all of which originated from his early IRA activity and subsequent incarceration. Heavy drinking and singing made him a pub-life celebrity, but he was famous for borrowing funds, as in this letter to his friend Gaynor Christ, the model for Sebastien Dangerfield in J. P. Donleavy’s 1955 novel, The Ginger Man. Behan died in 1964 at the age of forty-one.
Brendan Behan. Borstal Boy. London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1958.
Inscribed in both English and Gaelic: “To Michael Wray from his friend Brendan Behan 12.12.62.”
Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1954.
Born a generation after James Joyce and a deep admirer of his work, Samuel Beckett like Joyce found himself alienated from Irish nationalism and the censorship of his first stories. Like Joyce, too, Beckett moved to Paris and became enmeshed in its modernism. Yet on a trip back to Ireland he realized “that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more.… I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.” He turned to theater. Seamus Heaney describes Beckett’s “transformative way with language, his mixture of word-play and merciless humor.” Nowhere is that more apparent than in Waiting for Godot, his two-act tragicomedy that premiered in Paris in 1953 and Ireland in 1955. Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
Patrick Kavanagh. Recent Poems. Dublin: Privately printed by Peter Kavanagh, 1958.
One of twenty-five signed and numbered copies, with an accompanying letter inscribed, “For Dr C.S. Andrews from Patrick Kavanagh, Dublin December 1958.”
This volume contains the first appearance of some of Kavanagh’s most beloved late poems, written while he was recovering from cancer, including “Canal Bank Walk” and “Lines Written On a Seat On the Grand Canal, Dublin.”
Seamus Heaney. “Crediting Poetry.” Stockholm, 1995.
Photostat. Inscribed: “Seamus Heaney.” Courtesy copy of Heaney’s Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, distributed to attendees at the lecture, December 7, 1995.
Heaney was the next Irish poet after Yeats to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Nobel lecture, he spoke of Yeats standing “on this platform more than seventy years ago, [when] Ireland was emerging from the throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the heels of a war of independence fought against the British. … it was over by May, 1923, some seven months before Yeats sailed to Stockholm, but it was bloody, savage and intimate, and for generations to come it would dictate the terms of politics within… the Republic of Ireland.” Heaney observed that “Yeats barely alluded to the civil war or the war of independence in his Nobel speech. Rather, “he came to Sweden to tell the world that the local work of poets and dramatists had been as important to the transformation of his native place and times as the ambushes of guerilla armies.” And this has been the story of this exhibition.
Seamus Heaney. Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
With annotations by Heaney.
Heaney’s first commercially published book, Death of a Naturalist contains some of his most beloved poems. This copy was annotated by Heaney for its sale at a charity auction to benefit the British chapter of PEN. He writes that he was once described “as the poet laureate of the root vegetable.”
Ireland continues to generate literature fundamental to our time. The following eleven works are a small sample of the Irish output in poetry, fiction, and drama.
Paul Muldoon. New Weather. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.
Signed by Muldoon.
Eavan Boland. In a Time of Violence. New York: Norton and Co., 1994.
Derek Mahon. Night-Crossing. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Roddy Doyle. The Commitments. Dublin: King Farouk Publishing, 1987.
Signed by Doyle.
Colm Tóibín. Brooklyn. New York: Scribner, 2009.
Edna O’Brien. The Country Girls. London: Hutchinson, 1960.
Sally Rooney. Normal People. London: Faber and Faber, 2018.
John McGahern. Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
Claire Keegan. Foster. New York: Grove Press, 1922.
Anne Enright. The Gathering. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.
Samuel Beckett. [c. 1978].
Vintage photograph. Inscribed to his protégé, friend and collaborator, Rick Cluchey.
Brendan O’Connell. Patrick Kavanagh, 2025.
Oil Portrait.
