Irish-American · 1926–2017
J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man made its author famous and infamous simultaneously. The picaresque tale of Sebastian Dangerfield's misadventures in post-war Dublin combined Joycean verbal play with bawdy comedy. Publishers rejected it; when it finally appeared, censorship battles followed. Donleavy's prose style—fragmented, lyrical, shifting between first and third person—captured his protagonist's anarchic energy. Born in Brooklyn, Donleavy studied at Trinity College Dublin on the GI Bill and eventually became an Irish citizen. His subsequent novels never matched The Ginger Man's impact, but that single book secured his place in the tradition of comic fiction.