Top 10 Irish-American writers

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1. Dennis Lehane

Growing up an immigrant in the poorest part of South Boston wouldn't seem to be the best recipe for success, but Dennis Lehane says that the story-telling traditions of his Irish background inspired him.

“In immigrant cultures,” he recently told January magazine, “particularly Irish which is a very storytelling culture, a very musical culture . . . there's a certain rhythm to the language."

Lehane has written mystery novels, short stories, and film adaptations … Not bad for someone who dropped out of two colleges before the age of 20. 

2. Joseph O’Neill

Joseph O’Neill may have a Turkish mother, have grown up in Holland, studied at Cambridge and practiced as a lawyer in London, but he is most certainly Irish. His father Kevin was a construction worker and O’Neill was born in Cork. He has lived in New York for the past ten years, and in 2008 he published “Netherland,” which won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction and earned glowing reviews.

Ireland doesn’t feature in the novel, which is about a wealthy Dutch financial advisor with marital troubles who likes to play cricket; but we’ll let O’Neill away with that.

3. Dennis Donoghue

Professor Donoghue began his working life in Dublin, dallying for a while at University College Dublin (he was professor of English and American literature for 13 years), before moving to Cambridge, England, and most recently, NYU.

Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA also feature on his resumé, as does the Abbey Theatre, Dublin – he is a member of the board – and the BBC. Along the way, Donoghue has written and edited 34 books, including “We Irish”(1986) and “Reading America” (1987).

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Nster.com