Frank O'Connor: A Life

In a rapid-fire, just-the-facts-style biography, McKeon offers a quick overview of Irish writer Frank O'Connor's life (1903-1966), from his miserable, poverty-stricken boyhood in Cork (where he was born Michael O'Donovan) to his ultimate lionization in the U.S. literary and academic worlds. McKeon (a poet, novelist and performer of a one-man show based on O'Connor's short story, ""An Only Child"") touches on most of the important events and people of O'Connor's life: his relationships with his adoring mother, Minnie, and his alcoholic father, Mick; his youthful experiences as an Irish patriot; his autodidacticism (he left school at 12); his successes as a professional librarian; his adventures in Irish theater; his literary friendships (George William Russel, Yeats, O'Faolain); and the various, sometimes debilitating illnesses he suffered. The complexities of O'Connor's domestic world are included here, too. His combination of honesty and indecisiveness led to his maintaining a household in Dublin that was home to his mother and his three children as well as a menage a trois with his wife, Evelyn Bowen, and his mistress, Joan Knape. But McKeon, despite offering a 10-page bibliography, discusses only some of O'Connor's poems, articles, short stories and books. Indeed, McKeon's brisk account is short on detail and analysis--he mentions, for instance, that the diagnosis he received at age 34 of ""cancer, five years to live,"" which haunted O'Connor, was erroneous, but never explains what really was wrong. McKeon offers a quick, accessible source of information, but for fuller explanations readers will have to turn elsewhere; this book will supplant neither previous biographies nor O'Connor's autobiography, My Father's Son. Photos. (Mar.)