Flann O’Brien [pen-name of Brian O’Nolan, or Brian Ó Nualláin in Irish; also wrote newspaper columns as Myles na gCopaleen] (1911-1966) was born in Strabane, Co. Tyrone, the son of a Customs Officer who was appointed Commissioner and moved to Dublin in 1923. Having always spoken Irish at home and learned his English from books, he received his first formal education with the Christian Brothers in Synge Street (for him an unpleasant experience described in The Hard Life and elsewhere), before proceeding via the Holy Ghost Fathers at Blackrock College, 1927-29, to UCD. There he became a talented contributor to the Literary and Historical Debating Society, while his gift for comic writing found expression in the student magazine Comhthrom Féinne (ed. by Niall Sheridan, 1912- ), in which he launched his first literary persona, 'Brother Barnabas’. With his brother Ciarán, O’Nolan co-founded a humorous magazine called Blather which purported to be a 'publication of the Gutter’. Although short-lived, it gave O’Nolan the chance to develop the staple method of his later newpaper columns in The Irish Times , using a literary persona ('Count O’Blather’) steeped in puns, parodies, and satirical advice.

After completing an anthology-thesis on Gaelic nature poetry at UCD (written in Irish), O’Nolan joined the Civil Service as a junior Administrative Officer in the Department of Local Government in 1935. Despite his 'spare-time literary work’ he rose eventually to be principal officer for town planning. When his father’s death in 1937 left him as sole breadwinner for the family he was spurred to submit for publication the novel with which he had been toying for some years. At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) was hailed critically and much relished by James Joyce, who must have recognized his profound influence on it, but it sold poorly. O’Nolan’s next novel, The Third Policeman , went the round of publishers in 1940, and met with repeated rejections in war-time England, causing him such disappointment that he made no further attempts to have it published. (It appeared posthumously in 1967.) About this time an exchange of colourful letters written over a variety of false names in the correspondence columns of The Irish Times brought O’Nolan, their principal author, to the attention of the editor, R. M. Smyllie (d.1954). At Smyllie’s invitation he began contributing his humorous column 'Cruiskeen Lawn’, which ran in the paper from 1940 until his death. For the first year the column was mainly in Irish but drifted into English and continued thus exclusively. 'Myles na gCopaleen’, the name (derived from Boucicault’s character) over which the column appeared, was developed as yet another of his masks, while characters such as 'the brother’ were frequently quoted in an enriched Dublin argot which was enthusiastically adopted by the column’s fans. Some of the material was simply humorous - puns, word games, fantasies, and anecdotes - but much of it was satirically directed against politicians, bureaucrats, and mediocrities in office.

Over the next twenty years the column was to provide the basis of O’Nolan’s contemporary fame. The later articles grew increasingly bitter, reflecting his growing antipathy to the compromised ideology of the new State. A satirical Irish novel An Béal Bocht (1941) had a limited market until it appeared in English as The Poor Mouth (1964). His play, Faustus Kelly, a wordy but amusing satire on politicians, was taken off after two weeks at the Abbey Theatre in 1943, while The Insect Play , adapted from Karel Capek, ran a mere five nights at the Gate in the same season. 'Cruiskeen Lawn’ appeared less frequently when added responsibility at work with its attendent bureaucratic frustrations increasingly soured the writer’s temper. A series of accidents and illnesses led to bouts of drunkenness; and when, in 1953, it was felt that his attacks on establishment figures in the column could be ignored no longer, the Civil Service persuaded him to take voluntary retirement. Obliged to support himself and his wife Evelyn McDonnell, whom he had married in 1948, he stepped up production of 'Cruiskeen Lawn’, syndicated a somewhat tamer column to provincial papers, and took hack work wherever he could find it. This bleak period ended in 1960 when a reissue of At Swim-Two-Birds enjoyed tremendous success. His confidence restored, O’Nolan soon produced another best-selling novel, The Hard Life (1961). Further illness and work on a television series delayed completion of his next book, The Dalkey Archive (1964). Both of these later novels display a certain striving after effect and a desire to shock, mainly through irreverence towards the Catholic church. The Dalkey Archive was successfully dramatized by Hugh Leonard in 1963, shortly before O’Nolan’s death from cancer. The eventual publication of The Third Policeman (1967) followed quickly, while an unfinished novel, 'Slattery’s Sago Saga’, was included in Stories and Plays (1974). Selections from 'Cruiskeen Lawn’ and other columns have been published as The Best of Myles (1985). See Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails (1976), and No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (1989); Timothy O’Keeffe, ed., Myles: Portraits of Brian O’Nolan (1973); Anne Clissmann, Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction (1975), and Brendán Ó Conaire, Myles na Gaeilge  (1986); and Thomas F. Shea, Flann O’Brien’s Exorbitant Novels (1993).

At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), O’Brien’s first novel, written in a comic manner involving elements of burlesque and parody, based equally on pulp fiction and Old and Middle Irish tales made familiar by the literary revival. The frame-story is narrated by a student living uneasily at his uncle’s house in Dublin while desultorily studying at UCD, and engaged in writing a book about an author called Trellis. The latter has borrowed his characters from the existing pool of literary stereotypes, including notably a group of cowboys who elude his control and run riot in Ringsend. In keeping with the student’s theory that every character should be allowed 'a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living’, they in turn contrive to bring Trellis to trial on charges of mistreating them in a book of their own. Trellis is saved when the manuscript is accidentally destroyed, while the narrator passes his exams and is reconciled with his uncle. Caught up in these bewildering events are characters from Gaelic legend and folklore, such as Finn MacCool [Fionn mac Cumail], Mad Sweeney [see Buile Shuibhne ], and the Pooka. O’Brien’s novel was profoundly conditioned by the stylistic experiments in Ulysses and Joyce paid it the compliment of reciting passages by heart. A modernist novel, it ignores the conventional rules of plotting, offering instead an exuberantly 'self-evident sham’.

An Béal Bocht [ The Poor Mouth ] (1941) a novel in Irish by "Myles na gCopaleen" [i.e., Flann O’Brien], translated by Patrick C. Power as The Poor Mouth (1964). It describes a series of episodes in the life of the narrator who inhabits the fictitious Gaeltacht community of Corca Dorcha. Living in poverty and squalor and drenched by incessant rain, the people attempt to impress the authorities with the quality of their English, and the Gaeligores (Irish-language enthusiasts) with their Irish. The book satirizes classic Gaeltacht autobiographies such as Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach, the patronizing attitude of academics towards native speakers, and the general perception of the Gaeltacht as a delightfully depressed region, though too poor, wet, and 'putrid’ to reside in.

Faustus Kelly , a play by Myles na Gopaleen [i.e, Flann O’Brien] first produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1943. Kelly, chairman of an unspecified Urban District Council, makes a pact with the Devil in the local by-election. The Devil, called 'The Stranger’, is elected a rate-collector; however, his appointment is not sanctioned by the Department, and he flees, unable to endure Irish public life any longer, leaving Kelly in the lurch. The play is sustained chiefly by its close attention to the hypocritical rhetoric of corrupt bureaucracy.

Hard Life, The (1961) a novel subtitled 'An Exegesis of Squalor’ in which two orphans, Manus and his brother Finbarr (the narrator), are brought up on turn-of-the-century Dublin by Mr. Collopy, a relative, whose mind is fixed on a project to institute public lavatories for women. The boys encounter brutality from the Christian Brothers at school, and at home, the casuistry of Collopy’s Jesuit friend, Father Kurt Fahrt. When Manus’s attempt to cure Collopy’s rheumatism with a patent medicine causes an even more debilitating condition, he arranges an audience with the Pope in Rome, hoping for a miracle, but the interview turns into an argument and Collopy dies soon afterwards in a grotesque accident. The mordant narrative is pervaded by an atmosphere of hypocrisy and futility, relieved only by the comical vulgarity of the characters.

The Dalkey Archive (1964), a novel set the south Co. Dublin suburban town of that name. The central character, Mick Shaughnessy, feels threatened by his clever and domineering girlfriend. He sets out to solve this and larger problems by rational planning. The mainstays of the plot are the idiosyncratic scientist De Selby, who plans to destroy humanity with a patent compound called DMP, and a publican called James Joyce, who denounces the works imputed to him as filth and professes a desire to be a Jesuit. Mick seeks to engage the two in writing a work of literature of such absorbing complexity that de Selby can do no harm, but matters resolve themselves independently of him. Though conceived as a satire on overly-schematic views of reality, the novel barely rises above burlesque - unlike its antecedent, The Third Policeman (1967), from which several ingredients are recycled.

The Third Policeman (1967), written in 1940, but refused by the publisher of At Swim-Two Birds and other publishers to O’Brien’s great embarrassment, causing him to report that the manuscript had been lost, as it remained throughout his lifetime. It is nevertheless his most serious (though nonetheless comical) and most ethically interesting novel. With his accomplice Divney, the unnamed first-person narrator plans and executes the murder of Mathers, a wealthy farmer and publican whose indigent guest he has been for years. A mysterious journey brings him to a police-station where he is confronted with the puzzling activities of the eccentric constabulary. Sergeant Pluck is obsessed with a molecular theory according to which the nature of bicycles and their riders gradually interpenetrate. Constable McCruiskeen is involved in making a series of identical hand-made boxes which nest within each other in an infinite regress. Fox, the third policeman, operates the machine which generates eternity. The text is accompanied by footnotes containing a running commentary on the scientific notions of De Selby, O’Brien’s eccentric time-space philosopher. Divney’s return after sixteen years provides the shock that kills the narrator, revealing the narrative as a sentence in the afterlife which will be repeated endlessly. Combining elements of squalor and the macabre with the fantastic and jejune, and using a style of vibrant malapropism to represent the language of the dead, this anti-conventional and nihilistic novel satirizes the sloth and self-absorption that O’Brien discerned in Irish society.