James Patrick Donleavy (23 April 1926 – 11 September 2017) was an American-Irish novelist, short story writer and playwright.[1] His best-known work is the novel The Ginger Man, which was initially banned for obscenity.
Early life
Donleavy was born in Brooklyn, to Irish immigrants Margaret and Patrick Donleavy, and grew up in the Bronx. His father was a firefighter, and his mother came from a wealthy background.[2][3] He had a sister, Mary Rita, and a younger brother.[4][5] He received his education at various schools in the United States, then served in the US Navy during World War II.[1] After the war ended, he moved to Ireland. In 1946 he began studying bacteriology at Trinity College Dublin, but left in 1949 before taking a degree.
Career
Donleavy's first published work was a short story entitled A Party on Saturday Afternoon, which appeared in the Dublin literary periodical Envoy in 1950.[4] He gained critical acclaim with his first novel, The Ginger Man (1955), which is one of the Modern Library 100 best novels.[6] The novel, of which Donleavy's friend and fellow writer Brendan Behan was the first person to read the completed manuscript,[5][7] was banned in Ireland and the United States by reason of obscenity. Lead character Sebastian Dangerfield was in part based on Trinity College companion Gainor Crist, an American Navy veteran also studying at Trinity College on the G.I. Bill, whom Donleavy once described in an interview as a "saint", though of a Rabelaisian kind.[8]
Donleavy declared himself to be an atheist at the age of 14.[12] In 1946, he married Valerie Heron; the couple had two children: Philip (born 1951) and Karen (born 1955). They divorced in 1969 and he remarried in 1970 to Mary Wilson Price; that union ended in divorce in 1989.[7] In 2011, it was reported that Donleavy had not fathered his two children with Price. A DNA test in the early 1990s had confirmed that Rebecca was the daughter of brewing scion Kieran Guinness, and Rory was the son of Kieran's older brother Finn, whom Price married after her divorce from Donleavy. "My interest is only to look after the welfare of the child," Donleavy told The Times, "and after a certain stage, you can't worry about their parentage".[13]
He lived at Levington Park, a country house on 200 acres (0.81 km2) directly on Lough Owel, near Mullingar, County Westmeath, from 1972.[7] Throughout much of his life, he was known as Mike by close friends, though the origins of this nickname are unclear.[14]
