Young John McGahern

This short book explores John McGahern's impassioned discovery of art as a young man and traces his imaginative formation during his twenties. Overcoming his mother's death and his father's unstable and narcissistic oppression, McGahern liberated himself through his intense reading of classic writers, notably Proust and Tolstoy, and the Irish poets Kavanagh and Yeats. He found beauty and meaning in the personal visions of such powerful personalities, and he was inspired by his reading to begin writing. As well as presenting an account of McGahern's reading, and his contacts with other writers in Dublin and London, this book traces the emergence of his fictional style through unpublished work and eventually in his first novel, The Barracks. It was recognized as a classic on publication in 1963, and over the next decades McGahern became the most admired Irish novelist of the past fifty years, successor to Joyce and Beckett.