Vol. 15 (2025): Portable Ireland: Literary and Cultural Itineraries
Miscellanea

“Well, cut my legs off and call me Shorty”: Flann O’Brien, the American Mythos and its Argot

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  • Stanley E. Gontarski
Stanley E. Gontarski
Florida State University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/SIJIS-2239-3978-16598

Published 2025-07-29

Keywords

  • Alan Simpson,
  • Dublin Cattle Market,
  • Modernism,
  • Tennessee Williams,
  • The Pike Theatre

How to Cite

Gontarski, S. E. (2025). “Well, cut my legs off and call me Shorty”: Flann O’Brien, the American Mythos and its Argot. Studi Irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies, 15, 117–124. https://doi.org/10.36253/SIJIS-2239-3978-16598

Copyright (c) 2025 Stanley E. Gontarski

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In the conservative Dublin of the 1950s, a tiny Pike Theatre was making a name for itself by staging the controversial American playwright, Tennessee Williams, for Dublin’s first International Theatre Festival.  Its director, Alan Simpson, was arrested, however, for “presenting for gain an indecent and profane performance”. According to The Lost Letters of Flann O’Brien, O’Brien apparently wrote to Williams for advice about resuscitating his own flagging theatrical attempts (McGowan, Sherlock 2021, 155-56). This essay contextualizes the letters to situate O’Brien’s grafting an American mythos and its idiom onto “The Auld Sod”.

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