This book details the generation of authors who, under the guidance of editor Sean O'Faolain, contributed to Ireland's premier literary journal of the mid-twentieth century, The Bell. It offers a new and enlightening view on the literary landscape of post-independence Ireland and places The Bell's contributors in their proper international context in an Atlantic world of letters between America, Ireland and the United Kingdom. O'Faolain and his co-editor Peadar O'Donnell drew around them a generation of diverse and talented writers in The Bell that flourished in the shadows of W.B. Yeats and...

This is a comprehensive study of one of the most influential literary groups in post-independence Ireland: the writers and editors of the literary magazine The Bell. Sean O'Faolain and the generation of writers that matured in the shadows of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce dominated the literary landscape in Ireland in the build-up to, and during, the Second World War. This is their story, as told through the history of one journal: The Bell. Working with previously unpublished archival material, this study looks to illuminate the relationships, disputes and loves of the contributors to Ireland's...