Description
Book SynopsisPrivate Histories is a complete literary history of the American Irish during the first part of the twentieth century. Ron Ebest offers a fresh perspective on familiar novelists, dramatists, and poets, introduces readers to a number of important writers who are often overlooked, and reveals rarely considered aspects of Irish-American social history.
Ebest analyzes themes of particular importance to early twentieth-century Irish Americanssuch as religion, marriage, family, eceonomic hardship, social status, and educationin the writings of well-known authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O'Neill. He also explores these issues in the works of lesser known authors such as the Vanity Fair satirist Anne O'Hagan, labor activist and novelist Jim Tully, muckraking journalist Clara Laughlin, and the mystery writer John T. McIntyre.
Ebest's highly readable style makes Private Histories an excellent book for undergraduate and graduate courses on Irish-Amer
Trade Review
“Ebest's extraordinarily broad review of Irish American writing and scholarship is accompanied by insightful analysis and nuanced observations. Undoubtedly, Private Histories will interest the general reader and prove useful in undergraduate and graduate courses in Irish American literature and history.” —Journal of American Ethnic History
"Ebest . . . explores religion, family, marriage and more in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell and Eugene O'Neill. It is in the work of lesser known authors (such as Anne O'Hagan, Jim Tully, Clara Laughlin and John T. McIntyre) that Ebest perhaps makes his most interesting contribution." —Irish America
“Often amusing, always articulate and intelligent, this period study certainly leaves its audience with an awareness of and appreciation for the transformative and formative years in Irish-American literature as well as its place in the evolving canon.” —Irish Literary Supplement
"This well-researched and erudite study belongs on the short list of essential books on Irish-American culture in the twentieth-century." —New Hibernia Review
“ . . . a critical literary history that compares the literary representation of Irish American life in the early decades of the 20th century with the historical context . . . [T]he study is particularly valuable for its recovery of a host of historically significant but forgotten Irish American writers of the period-Jim Tully, Ellen Glasgow, Kate Jordan, Donn Byrne, Anne O'Hagan, and George Kelly, to name a few . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice
“Ebest’s superb interdisciplinary study, Private Histories: The Writing of Irish Americans, 1900–1935, follows in the tradition of Charles Fanning’s landmark studies of this genre in the nineteenth century and advances our knowledge of this literature. Private Histories is both a definitive survey of Irish American writing in the pre-depression era as well as a major historiographical assessment of the role of this writing in shaping what is known about Irish America in those years.” —History: Reviews of New Books
