‘Mildly Eccentric’: Brian Friel's Writings for the Irish Times and the New Yorker

Abstract

The conventional view of Brian Friel's career portrays him as a struggling writer whose first stories appeared in the New Yorker in late 1959. After briefly producing a small body of finely crafted, albeit conventional, short stories, he devoted himself to writing plays full-time after the phenomenal success of Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). This traditional interpretation of Friel's career also relies upon the assertion that the young writer also turned away from prose because of his inability to break free of the genre's constricting conventions, which were imposed both by foreign editors demanding nostalgic portrayals of rural Ireland and, as first argued by Ulf Dantanus, by Friel's own ‘failure to free himself’ from the influence of Frank O'Connor. This article challenges our view of Friel's early career in several ways. First and foremost, it uncovers a trove of seventy six previously unknown ‘essay/stories’ that he wrote for The Irish Times between September 1957 and May 1962, short experimental pieces that force the reader to question her/his assumptions about the form and content of Friel's early career. Second, when contextualized among his uncollected stories for the New Yorker and the Irish Press, we recognize a radically different story writer than previously described in the criticism.