J. P. Donleavy

James Patrick Donleavy, known as J. P. Donleavy (Brooklyn, 1926 - Mullingar, 2017), was a novelist, short story writer and playwright of Irish descent who wrote in English. He is remembered for a dark, comic style and for a provocative picaresque tone that marked much of the second half of the twentieth century.

The son of Irish immigrants, he grew up in the Bronx and served in the US Navy during the Second World War. After the war he moved to Ireland, and in 1946 he began studying at Trinity College Dublin, though he left in 1949 without a degree. His first novel, The Ginger Man (1955), was first published in Paris. It became an international bestseller, but it was banned in both Ireland and the United States on grounds of obscenity.

Donleavy went on to write short stories, plays and further novels that kept his ironic eye on marginal and disillusioned characters. Critics sometimes grouped his early work with the kitchen sink writers and the Angry Young Men, though that label fits him only loosely. He spent much of his later life in County Westmeath, where he died in 2017.