Today's Video Headlines: 07/27/2024
“The Country Girls” before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93.
O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of roughly $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women: Caithleen Brady and Bridget Brennan journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin.
O’Brien was recognized well beyond the world of books. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners” named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde among others in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson, and she befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom O’Brien remembered as a “creature of paradoxes.
O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or even the Booker Prize. Her honors did include an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize and the Frank O’Connor award in 2011 for her story collection “Saints and Sinners,” for which she was praised by poet and award judge Thomas McCarthy as “the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an Irish woman.
By her early 20s, she was working in a pharmacy in Dublin and reading Tolstoy and Thackeray among others in her spare time. She had dreams of writing since sneaking out to nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a Joyce anthology and learned that “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was autobiographical.
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