American · 1918–1968
Edwin O'Connor won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with "The Edge of Sadness," a novel about an alcoholic priest's recovery in an Irish-American parish. The American author specialized in Boston Irish-Catholic communities, capturing their politics, religion, and family dynamics. His earlier novel "The Last Hurrah" became a classic of American political fiction. O'Connor died at forty-nine, leaving a body of work that documented a vanishing ethnic culture.