Top ten of the greatest Irish American writers - PHOTOS

Beloved scribes who though born on US soil had root in the Emerald Isle

PHOTO - Great Irish American scribes slideshow

Ireland has more esteemed scribes per square mile (or kilometer) than any other country.

The following Top Ten list includes writers of Irish extraction who were born on American soil.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald had Irish blood from both sides and at least one grandparent who grew up in the old country.

Though his most famous novel was The Great Gatsby, his most autobiographical novel was Tender is the Night, in which a promising shrink falls for his dreamiest schizophrenic ; a poignant romance ensues, one ultimately ruinous to the MD’s career, as the would-be Freud becomes a jaded caretaker.

Fitzgerald had to assume a caretaker role for his ever-more-troubled wife, Zelda, who met an appalling fate within a flame-engulfed psych ward.

He also had to contend with his own self-destructive impulses, and once said of himself: “drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead at 40.”

He wasn’t far off.
 
2. Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell’s mother was a suffragist of Irish-Catholic ancestry. When the mother fell casualty to the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, young Mitchell left college and headed back home to Atlanta.

She eventually launched a weekly column at the prominent Atlanta Journal, where she refined the art of character study. She also found a husband who took care of her when she severely broke her ankle.

While she was bedridden, the husband kept bringing home more and more historical books; finally he told her: “Why don’t you write your own?”

Mitchell took these words to heart, soon embarking on the manuscript which would become the legendary Gone with the Wind.

3. Jack London

Jack London’s father was an Irish-American astrologer; his mother was a music teacher who “claimed to channel the spirit of an Indian chief.” He left home at a young age and tried his hand at being an “oyster pirate.”

Eventually he became a full-blown drifter. Geographically speaking, he made it pretty far. Records show him serving time for vagrancy at a county jail in Buffalo, New York.

Though these penniless travels were bad for his health, they proved great for his adventurous fiction, such as novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Like no other writer, London could explore parallels in the violence among wild animals and the violence among humans.

4. Flannery O’ Connor

Flannery O’ Connor was a Georgia native with the viewpoint of being a devout Catholic intellectual in the predominately Protestant “Bible Belt.”

This region would be captured in much of O’Connor’s fiction, and she is now seen as a pioneer of the Southern Gothic style. Racial issues of the South are a persistent element in her work, as are characters with severe moral deficiencies and characters who have scant clue about the tragedy in store for them.

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Nster.com