Fitz-James O'Brien in Ireland and England, 1828-1851

Abstract

LTHOUGH Fitz-James O'Brien has long been recognized as one of the first imitators of Poe in the field of the short story and as the writer who to the weird and supernatural gave a setting definitely localized in time and place, and although he was much written about as the most colorful figure in New York's literary Bohemia of the I85o's, pouring into the magazines more than one hundred and sixty-four poems, stories, and essays, nevertheless our information about his life and writings has been almost entirely confined to the facts collected by William Winter and published in i88i in his volume The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O'Brien. In this book besides his own Sketch of O'Brien's life Winter included Recollections by five of O'Brien's friends. These articles give a picture of O'Brien's life and character during his ten years in America which is fair and accurate as far as it goes. Nothing except the vaguest of rumors is reported about his life in Ireland and England. All succeeding biographical accounts have of necessity been based on this volume. Even the introduction of Gilbert Seldes to a new collection of the in I932 adds only one new fact, and although Fred Lewis Pattee devotes thirteen pages to him in The Feminine Fifties (1940), he says that his life before his arrival in America must at present, and perhaps finally, be rated as legendary.'1 He then repeats the erroneous statement that he was born in Limerick. Arthur Hobson Quinn, too, in American Fiction (1936) says that O'Brien's stories seem to have begun with his residence in New York.2 To correct such recurring mistakes, to find out the facts still remaining available, and to reduce the rumored and legendary, for which O'Brien was himself largely responsible, to a series of authenticated biographical data, the writer of this article spent four months in the fall of I929 in Ireland and