Dead As Doornails

Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, returns to print as a true classic of Irish memoir. In this vivid account of post-war literary Dublin, Anthony Cronin captures a world as colorful and unruly as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Myles na Gopaleen.

Yet this memoir is more than a collection of anecdotes. It offers a sharp, clear-eyed antidote to the sentimental myths that often shape Dublin’s literary history. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety about the frustrations and contradictions of his generation: heavy drinking, sexual repression, insecurity and begrudgery, the narrowness of cultural life, and the bittersweet lure of exile.

Readers encounter a comic sojourn in France with Behan and follow Cronin to London, where he worked as a literary editor and befriended the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross and the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun.

The generation Cronin chronicles was, in many ways, marked by wasted promise. Through the luminous prose of Dead as Doornails, that lost potential is reclaimed, securing the book’s place in Irish literary history alongside the finest works of Behan, Kavanagh, and Myles.