John McGahern (1934-2006) was one of the pre-eminent Irish novelists and short-story writers of the twentieth century. A poetic social realist, he fashioned unsettling, sometimes savagely critical, works of fiction that deal in existential themes of loneliness, despair, alienation and the search for a means by which to authenticate subjectivity and truth in an incoherent, desacralised universe. The eldest of seven children, he was born in Dublin and raised in counties Leitrim and Roscommon in the west of Ireland. His mother, Susan, to whom he was deeply devoted, was a primary schoolteacher and his father, Francis, a police sergeant who, having fought with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), was among the first recruits to the Garda Síochána,…
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Citation: Harte, Liam. "John McGahern". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 March 2001; last revised 17 December 2024. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3044, accessed 17 January 2025.]
