Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker - Softcover

Bourke, Angela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619027151 ISBN 13: 9781619027152

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2016

Synopsis

To be a staff writer at The New Yorker during its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s was to occupy one of the most coveted and influential seats in American culture. Witty, beautiful, and Irish-born Maeve Brennan was lured to such a position in 1948 and proceeded to dazzle everyone who met her, both in person and on the page. From 1954 to 1981 under the pseudonym The Long-Winded Lady,” Brennan wrote matchless urban sketches of life in Times Square and the Village for the Talk of the Town” column, and under her own name published fierce, intimate fiction tales of childhood, marriage, exile, longing, and the unforgiving side of the Irish temper. Yet even with her elegance and brilliance, Brennan’s rise to genius was as extreme as her collapse: at the time of her death in 1993, Maeve Brennan had not published a word since the 1970s and had slowly slipped into madness, ending up homeless on the same streets of Manhattan that had built her career.

It is Angela Bourke’s achievement with Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker to bring much-deserved attention to Brennan’s complex legacy in all her triumph and tragedy from Dublin childhood to Manhattan glamour, and from extraordinary literary achievement to tragic destitution. With this definitive biography of this troubled genius, it is clear that Brennan, though always an outsider in her own life and times, is rightfully recognized as one of the best writers to ever grace the pages of The New Yorker.

About this title

About the Author:

Angela Bourke is the author of The Burning of Bridget Clearly, winner of the Irish Times Nonfiction Prize, and By Salt Water, a collection of short stores. She is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish at University College, Dublin, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Boston College, and the University of Minnesota, and the University of Notre Dame. A Dublin native, she once lived on Cherryfield Avenue, the street that Maeve Brennan made famous in her fiction.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bourke (The Burning of Bridget Cleary) writes a sensitive biography of writer Brennan, who came to the U.S. from Ireland as a teenager (her father was the first Irish ambassador to the U.S.) and in 1949, in her early 30s, joined the New Yorker to write about women's fashion. Tiny, fiercely intelligent and impeccably groomed, Brennan was cherished by her colleagues. William Maxwell, a close friend, edited her stories—mainly fictionalized accounts of her Irish childhood, which he greatly admired—for the magazine. She also wrote a "Talk of the Town" column under the pseudonym "The Long-Winded Lady." Yet behind the archly sophisticated persona, Bourke writes, was a fragile, alienated woman who, following a failed marriage to fellow writer St. Clair McKelway, drifted into an eccentric middle age and serious mental breakdown before leaving the New Yorker. She died in an obscure nursing home in 1993. Bourke, who teaches at University College, Dublin, draws a portrait rich in New Yorker history and modern Irish feminist history alike, one likely to do much to foster a new readership for Brennan's work. 8 pages of b&w photos.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1619027151
• ISBN 13: 9781619027152
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360