Liam O’Flaherty

Liam O’Flaherty was a novelist and short story writer who was born on one of the remote Aran Islands off the Western coast of Ireland. O’Flaherty was a soldier in World War I, during which he sustained a serious injury in a bomb explosion. He suffered from depression during this period. He later fought for and participated in revolutionary activities in Ireland in the early 1920s through the Irish Republican Army. He settled in England in 1922, but returned to Dublin in the 1920s, where he lived until he died nearly sixty years later. During the Irish Civil War he identified as a Republican. His novel The Informer (1925), about a confused revolutionary who betrays his friends, was adapted in 1935 by John Ford into an Oscar-winning film. His autobiography, Shame the Devil, came out in 1934, even as he lived for another fifty years, though he was less prolific during these later years.