A Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O'Connor (review)

Charles F. Duffy's recently published biography of the best-selling Boston writer Edwin O'Connor, winner of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize, more than answers the call for a book-length study of this author who proved vital to the development of an Irish-American literary tradition. Although the biography starts slowly, it becomes an engrossing and fascinating picture of a complex man whose life ended too soon. Duffy sustains a crucial balance between examining the writer's life while illuminating his work. He offers an intriguing and comprehensive picture of O'Connor within the framework of the author's family, his friends, his beloved Boston, his Catholicism, and naturally, his work.

Dividing his narrative into fourteen chronological chapters, corresponding roughly to milestones in the writer's life, Duffy steadily adds layer upon layer of background to reveal the arduous path to O'Connor's eventual success and celebrity—which concluded abruptly at O'Connor's sudden death at age 49. The first fifty pages document the years from O'Connor's birth as a third-generation Irish American in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, through his college years at Notre Dame. While at Notre Dame, O'Connor began a lifelong relationship with the young professor Frank O'Malley, to whom he dedicated his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Edge of Sadness. O'Connor's relationship with his father emerges in these first chapters; Duffy emphasizes throughout the book how O'Connor, in his fiction, struggled with the stern versus comic nature of the paternal figures. Because his own father encapsulates elements of both, this tension in his work becomes more understandable through Duffy's explication.

Duffy's research seems exhaustive as he details a page of a letter here, a column there, and an interview in another place about O'Connor's struggling years as a freelance writer. The multiple references to the vaudeville and radio personalities who entranced O'Connor may leave some readers a bit lost at times, but most of the material is engrossing, and certainly adds to a better understanding of the author who created such figures as Cuke Gillen and Waltzing Dan Considine. Although O'Connor was glad to earn money for writing his reviews—sometimes his only income—his contempt for much of radio and television comes through clearly in his columns. One of the more curious revelations about O'Connor's early work concerns his pieces about television written under the pseudonym "Roger Swift." Here, we see the usually deified Bob Hope as "lackluster," Frank Sinatra as "singularly unfunny," and Mike Wallace as "pretentious."

Finally, at age thirty-seven, O'Connor achieved literary and financial success with his 1956 novel The Last Hurrah about an Irish-American mayor of an unnamed city that is unmistakably Boston. At this point, Duffy's scrupulous attention to interviews, reviews, and letters clearly illuminates the sudden changes in O'Connor's lifestyle, finances, and reputation. Duffy points out the genesis of the novel and several of its characters: the Rhode Island J. F. Skeffington funeral home; the invigorating Irish-American political conversations at his college friends' Chicago homes; Louis Brems, O'Connor's commanding officer in the Coast Guard, whose endless supply of Boston Irish-American political anecdotes and jokes propelled him into the novel as the character Cuke Gillen; along with several other less direct, but interesting parallels with real life. Duffy confirms that James Michael Curley is the model for Skeffington, but he emphasizes that O'Connor could not openly admit to it because of Curley's propensity for litigation. At the same time, Duffy suggests that limiting a reading of The Last Hurrah strictly to that of a roman à clef would diminish other important influences on the novel, especially O'Connor's personal and familial experiences, and most notably his relationship with his father.

Duffy illuminates how O'Connor's evolving life reflects upon and within...