Literary Dublin - Dublin - page 447

dynamic. He was fond of the Grand Canal, along the banks of which he is commemor-
ated, with 'just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by', as he had wished.
You can't imagine the brooding Samuel Beckett (1906-89) hanging around in this com-
pany and, while his greatest literary contributions were as a dramatist in self-imposed ex-
ile, he did write a collection of short stories in Dublin, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934),
about an eccentric local character. The topic so irked the new Free State government that
it was banned, no doubt hastening Beckett's permanent move to Paris.
One-time civil servant Brian O'Nolan (1911-66), also known as Flann O'Brien and
Myles na Gopaleen, was a celebrated comic writer and career drinker. He wrote several
books, most notably At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1940), but was
most fondly remembered for the newspaper columns he penned for nearly three decades
before his death.
He was eclipsed - at least in the drinking stakes - by novelist, playwright, journalist
and quintessential Dublin hell-raiser, Brendan Behan (1923-64), who led a short and
frantic life. In 1953, Behan began work as a columnist with the now-defunct Irish Press,
and over the next decade wrote about his beloved Dublin, using wonderful, earthy satire
and a keen sense of political commentary that set him apart from other journalists. A col-
lection of his newspaper columns was published under the title Hold Your Hour and Have
Another .
If you want to see Beckett's phone, Behan's union card and a first edition of Dracula all under the one roof,
the Dublin Writers Museum has extensive collections of the city's most famous (dead) writers.