Series 6 - John Linehan memoir

162pp

Materials regarding a 1946 book written by Beatrice Bill Talbot, And That's No Lie (New York: Houghton Mifflin; Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press), the story of her employee John Linehan, born circa 1882 as one of 13 children of a shepherd in County Roscommon. Per Kerby A. Miller: 'Linehan was illiterate, so his life story no doubt began as oral history, recorded and/or transcribed (and no doubt edited) by Talbot... ...The vast majority of Linehan's account recounts his and his family's experiences, with each other and with their wealthy ""Ascendancy"" landlord employers, in cos. Roscommon and Kildare. Shepherds, like Linehan's father, comprised a specialized, but still very very poor, category of Irish rural laborers... ...Linehan devotes relatively little space to his own emigration and subsequent life in America-presumably because nearly all of it was spent in the employ of the woman to whom he's dictating his memories. It would be interesting, however, to speculate as to why he "hated" America (i.e., Boston) so much, before he met the Talbots. However, in my opinion the very best section of Linehan's memoir is Chapter 4, "Pat, My Oldest Brother," which describes nearly all aspects of his brother's emigration from home in extensive and intimate detail. Indeed, the moving account is reminiscent of one of Liam O'Flaherty's short stories about the social, cultural, and emotional tensions involved in the leaving of "home" by young men and women.The usefulness to us of Linehan's memoir depends in part on whether we conclude that Linehan's memoir is or is not a "staged performance" of "Irishness" for sentimental and/or gullible American readers.'
The series consists of: introductory notes on the memoir by Kerby A. Miller and Breandán MacSuibhne; Miller's edited transcript of the memoir; background research on Linehan; and a photocopy version of the 1946 Talbot book.