-- The story of an Irish college student who -- half to amuse himself and half to avoid work -- writes an irreverent novel about the figures of Irish myth and legend in which characters come to life and riot against their author. At Swim-Two-Birds is a wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture and has had a major influence on writers coming after O'Brien, including Anthony Burgess, Gilbert Sorrentino, and William H. Gass.
This gifted Irish writer had three identities: Brian O'Nolan, an Irish civil servant and administrator; Myles Copaleen, columnist for the Irish Times, poet and author of An Beal Bocht (The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life, 1941), a satire in Gaelic on the Gaelic revival; and Flann O'Brien, playwright and avant-garde comic novelist. His masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), went almost unrecognized in its time. This novel, which plays havoc with the conventional novel form, is about a man writing a book about characters in turn writing about him. O'Brien starts off with three separate openings. The Third Policeman (1967), funny but grim, plunges into the world of the dead, though one is not immediately aware that the protagonist is no longer living.
Author William Gass was born on July 30, 1924. He joined the Washington University faculty in 1969 and received an endowed chair in 1979. He was deeply concerned with the issues that writers face and was named director of the International Writers Center in 1990. Some of his writings include the novels "Omensetter's Luck" (1966) and "The Tunnel" (1995), and the classic book of short stories "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." Two of his essay collections earned the National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism.