Novelist and short-story writer Liam O’Flaherty was born on August 28, 1898, in a poverty-stricken village on Inishmore Island in County Galway on the western coast of Ireland. He was the ninth of ten children of Michael and Margaret O’Flaherty. A good student, he studied for a time for the Roman Catholic priesthood. However, he later renounced his religion.
In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army during the First World War and suffered a serious injury two years later in a bomb explosion at Langemarck, Belgium. After he recovered, the army discharged him because he had developed severe depression. He traveled widely, visiting South America, North America, and the Middle East and working at various odd jobs.
When he returned to Ireland, he embraced communism, became an atheist, and joined the Irish Republican Army in its campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule. In 1921, Britain and Ireland forged a treaty creating an Irish Free State. But because the document made the new Irish state part of the British Commonwealth of Nations rather than a fully independent entity, O’Flaherty and his IRA compatriots broke with fellow Irishmen who supported the treaty. Several of O’Flaherty’s novels center on the effects of war, revolution, and social upheaval in Ireland in the early twentieth century and in the nineteenth century. O’Flaherty died on Sept. 7, 1984, in Dublin.