Eimar O'Duffy (1893-1935)
Author of The Cuanduine Trilogy

He was born in Dublin, the eldest son of a prosperous dental surgeon who was dentist-in-ordinary to the Vice-Regal household. His father, Kevin O'Duffy, was of Anglo-Irish stock and his fictional alter-ego is the Eugene Lascelles of O'Duffy's long novel, The Wasted Island, who muses in appropriately snobbish fashion about his small son's destiny:
'Public school and Varsity, of course. After that . . . the Army perhaps? No,' he decided, thinking of certain possibilities. 'We can do better than that. What about the Diplomatic Service? A Public School and Varsity man has the Empire at his feet.'

In real life, the public school proved to be Stonyhurst but the boy angered the father by preferring University College Dublin to Trinity. He took a Bachelor of Dental Surgery degree at UCD and finally broke with his father when the latter tried to persuade him to enter the British Army during the First World War. In fact, he took a quite contrary direction by joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood and becoming a captain in the Irish Volunteers. When the 1916 insurrection was imminent, O'Duffy was sent by Eoin MacNeill to Belfast to head off any possibility of insurrectionary action there. His eventual disillusionment with the Easter Rising is made clear in The Wasted Island (1919). It was inevitable that, holding such views, he should have found it difficult to settle down permanently in the new Irish Free State, though he did for a time work as a teacher and in the Department of External Affairs in Dublin. Then, in 1925, he moved his family to England. He had married in 1920 Kathleen Cruise O'Brien, aunt of the (later) well-known writer and politician, Conor Cruise O'Brien. There were two children of the marriage; Brian and Rosalind.

O'Duffy was playwright, versifier, novelist and would-be economist. Never very wealthy, he often had to produce fairly trivial literary work in haste, to make ends meet. His earliest writings of any importance were two plays for Edward Martyn's Irish Theatre, The Phoenix on the Roof and The Walls of Athens. Another early play was Bricrui's Feast. His first novel was The Wasted Island, a heavily autobiographical and excessively lengthy work which Robert Hogan charitably describes as being 'among other things, a painless and vividly dramatised course in Irish history'. In the early 1920s, O'Duffy published two light novels, Printer's Errors and Miss Rudd and Some Lovers, as well as the historical romance, The Lion and the Fox. King Goshawk and the Birds, the opening volume of the trilogy which was to be his major literary achievement, appeared in 1926. The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street followed in 1928 and the final volume, Asses in Clover, came out in 1933. In the early 1930s, he published a number of potboilers, detective thrillers of no great literary importance. He developed a keen interest in economic theory and published Life and Money in 1932 and a pamphlet, Consumer Credit, in 1934. For many years he had suffered severe pain caused by chronic ulceration of the stomach and he died of this condition in Surrey in 1935.

From the Appletree Press title: The Anglo-Irish Novel Volume II.
Also from Appletree: The Anglo-Irish Novel Volume I, and Famous Irish Writers.