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Irish-American Autobiography
Athletes, Priests, Pilgrims, and More
Imprint: Catholic University of America Press
Is there still a distinct Irish identity in America? This highly original survey says yes, though it's 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 America's largest ethnic group, they've nonetheless stayed among the most visible (not least because St Patrick's 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 shifting 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 Mack—written when the Irish were eager to put their raffish origins behind them—later chapters trace the many tensions, often unspoken, registered by Irish Americans who've 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 connection—documenting an "ethnic fade" that never quite happened.
James Silas Rogers is the editor of New Hibernia Review.
"Rogers has penned a collection of his own essays about the genre he has done so much to advance… These essays are written with Rogers' characteristic insight on how an Irish and most often Catholic sensibility persist long beyond the mass arrivals of Irish immigrants into the United States."
~Irish Studies Review
"These essays, written over a decade or more, fit together cohesively and present a fresh, innovative insight into Irish-American identity through the prism of memoir. The writing is clear and elegant, the individual personal stories expertly linked."
~Patricia Byrne, Books Ireland
"Rogers offers a close reading of a single word from McCourt’s book (the single word ’Tis which serves as the entirety of McCourt’s concluding chapter) and in doing so, he gives us a great example to share with students to illustrate how even one word can offer opportunities for deep textual analysis and contextual research...The literary investigation of a varied and diverse selection of memoirs and autobiographies in Irish-American Autobiography allows Rogers to highlight the diversity of the Irish experience. The writing is sharp, lively, and expressive, which encourages readers to embrace Rogers’s enthusiasm toward these texts. His expert historical contextualization and deft textual analysis leave no doubt that the reader is being guided on a tour of the subject matter by someone of deep knowledge and experience. The fact that the tour guide writes with such wit and humor makes the journey that much better."
~Christopher Dowd, University of New Haven, American Ethnic History
"James Silas Rogers's collection of ten essays performs a number of important services for a genre that deserves greater scholarly attention. First, he calls attention to the many ways in which ethnic identity reveals itself in these texts, even when that is not the author's focus. He also broadens the definition of the genre to include autobiographical poetry, a television program, and other forms of nonfiction...Rogers is able to make insightful arguments about the character of Irish America and its self-expressions. Finally, Rogers uses productive new points of entry to analyze some texts that are quite popular...These little-discussed memoirs give fascinating reads on the nature of suburbia and how ethnicity gets expressed there. Rogers's final chapter explores the many recent memoirs that describe a return to the ancestral home. He convincingly argues that these varied texts are journeys of healing the trauma of displacement, a trauma still felt by the Irish diaspora and arguably represented not just in this last chapter, but in all the texts discussed in the collection."
~Wilkes-Barre, CJIS
"The first point to make about James Silas Rogers’s new book on Irish American autobiography is that it is a welcome addition to the scholarship on ethnic identity and literature... it is a valuable start that can be used to encourage a deeper examination of reading or to prompt classroom debate on any number of titles or writers."
~Linda Dowling Almeida, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, American Catholic Studies