In a busy literary life that almost spanned the twentieth century Seán O'Faoláin played successive roles as biographer, novelist, critic and literary theoretician, founder and editor of an important Irish journal, historian, and travel writer. He even wrote a play staged briefly at the Abbey Theatre in 1937 and an autobiography that covers only the first third of his life. But O'Faoláin's place in world letters is guaranteed by his short-story production, which will stand in quality beside the masters of the form from Edgar Allan Poe to Ernest Hemingway. In purely Irish terms he occupies a place of honor not just as a writer but as a literary groundbreaker, a social force, and a kind of national patriarch. As Irish writer Benedict Kiely said of O'Faoláin at the time of his countryman's death, O'Faoláin gave "great thought to...