O'Connor, Frank, 1903-1966

Frank O'Connor was born Michael Francis O'Donovan on September 17, 1903 in Cork city to Mary "Minnie" O'Donovan (née O'Connor) and Michael O'Donovan. Active on the Republican side in the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War, O'Connor was interned in Gormanston. After this experience, he turned against republicanism and political violence generally. Following his release from Gormanston, O'Connor worked as a librarian in Sligo, Cork, and Dublin until 1938. Beginning in the mid-1920s, O'Connor published numerous short stories and translations of poems from Irish, as well as dramatic works, memoirs, journalistic columns and features on aspects of Irish culture and history, criticism, novels, biography, and travel books. His work focused on Irish culture and language, with a particular eye to the relationship between modern Ireland and traditional Gaelic culture. In the 1930s, he became a member and later director of the board of the Abbey Theatre on the initiative of W.B. Yeats. During the early 1940s, he also served as poetry editor of and contributor to the literary, cultural, and political review The Bell, founded and edited by Sean O'Faolain. He spent much of the 1950s teaching in the United States.

O'Connor married Esther Evelyn Bowen Speaight, a divorced Welsh actress, in 1939, and they had two sons and one daughter. The two separated in 1949 and divorced in 1953. He also had one other son, born outside marriage to Joan Knape during this period of separation. O'Connor married Harriet Randolph Rich, in 1953, and they had one daughter together.

Frank O'Connor had a stroke while teaching at Stanford University in 1961, and he later died from a heart attack in Dublin on March 10, 1966.