Adrian Frazier – författare

Always at the center of cultural change and excitement, George Moore enjoyed a sixty-year literary career during which he wrote prolifically, befriended artists and authors from Paris to London to Dublin, and rejected marriage but never the company of women. This book—the first documentary biography of Moore since 1936—tells the remarkable story of a high-spirited man and his pathbreaking innovations as a writer. Adrian Frazier has mined letters, memoirs, society journals, writings not previously attributed to Moore, and other archives to reveal new information about Moore’s early life, his ostensibly promiscuous bachelor life, and his complex career as an author. The book provides an engaging account of Moore’s pursuit of his passions, from his early, failed attempt to become an artist in Paris in the 1870s through his long career as an author. Moore wrote plays, poetry, criticism, short stories, and sixteen novels, among them his best-known Esther Waters. His experiments in style ranged from the naturalistic A Mummer’s Wife to the stream-of-consciousness prose of The Lake to the seamless, fluent narratives of his late manner—the comic Hail and Farewell and the epic The Brook Kerith. Frazier records the relationships between Moore and his well-known friends—Yeats, Joyce, Archer, Shaw, Frank Harris, Sickert, Whistler, and many others—and with the many women in his life, including his greatest love, Lady Cunard. At the end of his life, Moore sought without success a writer who would candidly tell the story of his life, loves, and art. At last Adrian Frazier has written that story.

Behind the Scenes presents the story of Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre and its major creative personalities: W. B. Yeats, Annie Horniman, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory. Part history, part sociology, part biography, Frazier's work recreates the forces that shaped the Abbey stage, forces that involved the spirited participation of actors, audiences, press, and financiers as well as of the famous poet-playwright who was its co-director. His book unfolds an entertaining and suspenseful tale, centered on the undeniably autocratic personality of W.B. Yeats and with the political struggles of Ireland as a backdrop. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Behind the Scenes presents the story of Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre and its major creative personalities: W. B. Yeats, Annie Horniman, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory. Part history, part sociology, part biography, Frazier's work recreates the forces that shaped the Abbey stage, forces that involved the spirited participation of actors, audiences, press, and financiers as well as of the famous poet-playwright who was its co-director. His book unfolds an entertaining and suspenseful tale, centered on the undeniably autocratic personality of W.B. Yeats and with the political struggles of Ireland as a backdrop. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Adrian Frazier’s story about his friend John Behan is an informed, compelling personal account of this remarkable man. It gives focus and depth to the life of one of Ireland’s leading visual artists. The narrative follows Behan’s childhood in east Dublin to his role as a pivotal member of the creative fusion that was 1960s Dublin ‘Baggotonia’ (including Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Pye, Camille Souter and Thomas Kinsella) and of the Independent Artists’ group. John Behan has lived in Galway for many years, helping to establish the region and the city as a creative haven for its many artists and galleries: it is here that author and sculptor became friends. Beautifully designed and with over thirty full-colour photographs and illustrations, John Behan: The Bull of Sheriff Street is a fitting tribute and celebration of Ireland’s most famous living sculptor. The work includes a listing of one hundred of the artist’s principal works.

In the course of a 1935 USA Abbey Theatre tour of the plays of Sean O’Casey and others, an extensive collaboration was launched between director John Ford (‘My real name is Sean Martin Aloysius O’Feeney’), fresh from shooting O’Flaherty’s The Informer, and star players such as Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields. Tempted by movie contracts, these great stage actors resettled in Hollywood and became members of what was informally called Ford’s ‘stock company’, appearing again and again in his key films such as The Long Way Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Quiet Man (1952). Based on a hitherto-unknown cache of Shields family papers and memorabilia, Frazier traces the remarkable life stories of these actors in their migration from Dublin to California. He shows how signifying elements of the Irish Revival mutated from world theatre to global cinema, giving fresh readings to some of the great films of the era. Richly illustrated, and driven by a sparkling narrative style, Hollywood Irish brings depth and perspective to Ireland’s part in the fashioning of American identity.

In the late twentieth century, Irish poetry achieved an historic quality, a golden era to compare with the verse of the Elizabethan and the Romantic periods. A Poet’s Life is the definitive biography of one of the first and foremost poets in this golden generation, John Montague. Inspired by the examples of Yeats and Joyce, he consciously educated himself to play a central role in the self-understanding of his people. Ahead of the public recognition of such issues, Montague wrote personally about abortion, divorce, alcoholism, domestic violence, and clerical abuse in education. His poetry offered to others release from a painful past. Out of where he was most hurt, his best work issued. When the Troubles erupted in his home province, he was to the forefront in engaging with events directly, sometimes in a cross-community effort with fellow poets of the other faith. This record of his life is also an intimate, familial account of modern Irish poetry and its precision, documentary basis, and reliable chronology, it is sure to become a vital conduit into a body of poetry that will never be forgotten. Already a highly lauded biographer, Adrian Frazier was a close acquaintance of Montague for more than forty years. In this fully authorised narrative that is clear, candid, and marbled with humour, Frazier reveals the sources of poetry in Montague’s life and traces the progress of his style from book to book. Based on Montague’s archive of private papers, and informed by the counsel of the poet’s lifelong friends, partners, and fellow poets, this is a monumental work of Irish literary biography, sure to be a classic of the genre.

'Playboys of the Western World is a model of contemporary performance studies.' 'The book is remarkably well-focused: half is a series of production histories of Playboy performances through the twentieth century in the UK, Northern Ireland, the USA, and Ireland. The remainder focuses on one contemporary performance, that of Druid Theatre, as directed by Garry Hynes. The various contemporary social issues that are addressed in relation to Synge's play and this performance of it give the volume an additional interest: it shows how the arts matter.'