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Oliver St. John Gogarty Collection

 Collection
Identifier: MS 1

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The Oliver St. John Gogarty consists of 13 series: (1) Notebooks, (2) Major Prose Works and Collections, (3) Essays and Individual Prose Pieces, (4) Plays, Scenarios, Scripts, (5) Poems in the Collected Poems, the Unselected Poems, and the Unpublished Penultimate Poems, (6) Individual Manuscript Poems, Mostly Unpublished,(7) Manuscripts of Others, (8) Gogarty Fragments and Notes, (9) Correspondence, (10) Gogarty Memorabilia, (11) Miscellaneous Publications [Preserved by, or related to Oliver St. John Gogarty], (12) Materials form the Estate of Mab [Wilson Wright] Moltke. (13) Materials Related to the Collection. The bulk of the collection is Correspondence; Sub-Series to Gogarty, from Gogarty, and Miscellaneous Correspondence.

Dates

  • Creation: 1903-1955

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research use.

Conditions Governing Use

The materials in this collection may be protected under copyright law and may only be used for educational, teaching, and research purposes. If the intended use is beyond these purposes, it is the responsibility of the user to obtain the appropriate permissions by contacting Special Collections/University Archives at the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA.

Biographical / Historical

Oliver St. John Gogarty (born August 17, 1878, Dublin, Ireland—died September 22, 1957, Manhattan, New York, U.S.) was a writer, wit, and raconteur associated with the Irish literary renaissance whose memoirs vividly recreate the Dublin of his youth. Gogarty worked as a surgeon and was also a senator in the government of the Irish Free State.

Gogarty grew up in a middle-class family and attended Royal University (now University College Dublin), where he was a fellow student of James Joyce. For a short time, they were roommates in a demilitarized Martello tower near Dublin that was leased by Gogarty. However, the friendship ended after an incident in which Gogarty and Samuel Chenevix Trench, another roommate, terrified Joyce by shooting a gun inside the tower. Gogarty later appeared in Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) as the character “stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” an identification that he heartily disliked and that proved to be a lifelong irritant to him. (He did not take Joyce seriously as an artist.) A slightly adapted version of a bawdy, profanity-laced poem of Gogarty’s, nicknamed “The ballad of joking Jesus,” also appears in Ulysses.

Gogarty practiced as a surgeon and throat specialist in Dublin, where he became acquainted with William Butler Yeats, George Moore, George William Russell (AE), and other leaders of the renaissance. Gogarty was closely involved with the Irish republican political party Sinn Féin, speaking at the party’s founding meeting in 1905 and writing plays that baldly expressed Sinn Féin sympathies. Between 1922 and 1936 Gogarty served as a senator for the Irish Free State. During the Irish Civil War, he was kidnapped by a faction of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) that had begun a campaign of targeting Free State senators. (The IRA had splintered after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 resulted in six counties remaining part of the United Kingdom.) Gogarty escaped his kidnappers in part by jumping into Dublin’s River Liffey and swimming to safety.

Gogarty wrote the entertaining memoirs As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937), Tumbling in the Hay (1939), and It Isn’t This Time of Year at All (1954). In 1939 he traveled to the United States to begin a lecture tour and settled in the country permanently, having become disillusioned with political developments in Ireland. He died of a heart attack while living in New York City.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2024, September 18). Oliver St. John Gogarty. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oliver-St-John-Gogarty

Full Extent

10.08 Linear Feet (Twenty-four 5-inch document boxes )

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Arrangement

The majority of the records are arranged alphabetically. Each item is arranged chronologically within the folders.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Received from LaFayette L. Butler, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 1975.

Related Names

Subjects

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Title
Oliver St. John Gogarty Collection
Status
Completed
Author
Laura Wertz
Date
2025 May
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Repository Details

Repository Details

Part of the Bucknell University Special Collections/University Archives Repository

http://www.bucknell.edu/SpecialCollections
Contact:
028 Bertrand Library
Bucknell University
One Dent Drive
Lewisburg PA 17837 United States US
570-577-3101
570-577-3313 (Fax)

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