Irish-American Autobiography

Is there still a distinct Irish identity in America? This highly original survey says yes, though its often an indirect one. True, the age of heroic immigration is over, and today the term Irish-American almost always means an American of Irish descent. If the Irish long ago ceased to be Americas largest ethnic group, theyve nonetheless stayed among the most visible (not least because St Patricks Day has been adopted by the nation at large). But for all the external trappings of Irishness, the terms, traditions, and nuances of that identity stay elusive. Irish-American Autobiography opens a new window on the shiing meanings of Irishness over the twentieth century, by looking at a range of works that have never before been considered as a distinct body of literature. Opening with celebrity memoirs from athletes like boxer John L. Sullivan and ballplayer Connie Mackwritten when the Irish were eager to put their raffish origins behind themlater chapters trace the many tensions, oen unspoken, registered by Irish Americans whove told their life stories. New York saloonkeepers and South Boston step dancers set themselves against the larger culture, setting a pattern of being on the outside looking in. Even the classic 1950s TV comedy The Honeymooners speaks to the urban Irish origins, and the poignant sense of exclusion felt by its creator Jackie Gleason. Catholicism, so key to the identity of earlier generations of Irish Americans, has also evolved. One chapter looks at the painful diffidence of priest autobiographers, and others reveal how traditional Irish Catholic ideas of the guardian angel and pilgrimage have evolved and stayed potent down to our own time. Irish-American Autobiography becomes, in the end, a story of a continued search for connectiondocumenting an ethnic fade that never quite happened.