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Irish Biographies

When a book called Angela's Ashes arrived on Mrs. Kenny's desk a few years ago, she took a copy home. The following day, when she asked that we check with the major Irish book wholesalers as to how many copies they were carrying, the wholesalers asked "Why? It's only an autobiography of some guy from Limerick we've never heard of." The rest is history.

Maybe once a decade the book trade gets caught with an autobiography that defies all predictions. In the past three decades, major successes were Alice Taylor's "To School Through The Fields" and of course, Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes". More recent successes include Nuala Ó Faoláin's "The Story of Chicago May", a mesmerizing Irish beauty, with startling blue eyes and hair spun of red and gold who captured the hearts of men wherever she went. At nineteen, she stole her family's savings and ran away from her home in rural Ireland to America where she became a notorious criminal... Another great story is Donal Nevin's biography of James Connolly, and his role in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916.

The literary, social & political history of Ireland lends itself to some great volumes of biography, and Kennys have in excess of one thousand volumes of Irish biography, which includes several hundred on political and literary biography.