This chapter traces Irish America’s place in the lineage of today’s white nationalist movement, to help explain the remarkable prominence of Irish American Catholics in contemporary America’s racist, alt-right movement, as well as the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Irish American Catholics are prominent also among Democratic Party’s progressive left-wing, too. However, given the history of vilification of Irish Catholic immigrants by hard-right groups such as the Know-Nothings in the nineteenth century and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the twentieth, the sheer number of Irish American extreme right-wingers has puzzled and merits deeper investigation. The chapter investigates how the Catholic Irish transmuted from a redundant, expendable people in the British colonial state in Ireland, to valuable American citizens, and ultimately white American nationals, through an analysis of the work of the most accomplished and prolific of all Irish American writers, Eugene O’Neill and James T. Farrell.

When James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy is read today, it is typically read within limits. It serves as an example of proletarian, sociological, or naturalist fiction. In this view, it is emblematic of the post-Chicago Renaissance dark age of creativity, it demonstrates the influence of the University of Chicago’s sociology department’s focus on neighborhoods and juvenile delinquency, or it is an example of ethnic literature. With this chapter, I take the Chicago sociologists’s focus on “ecology” and broaden it to include human relationships with their non-human surroundings. Doing so demonstrates the wide potential of readings for Studs Lonigan, wherein the preceding circumscriptions give way to new forms of collaboration, contamination, and association more in line with ecological thinking of our own time. It is precisely Studs’s ability to take advantage of Chicago’s own ecological planning, with its large network of parks, that present these moments of what Donna Haraway calls “making kin.” It is up to us new readers, then, to understand why the potential remains unused.

This chapter examines some key developments in Irish-American literary relations from the middle of the century to the 1980s. It begins by arguing that this was a period when Irish-American literary relations acquired a new complexity – in both the reception of the work of Irish writers in the United States and the emergence of a distinctive and authoritative Irish-American voice. It then goes on to examine the distinctive contribution of Irish and Irish-American writers to the development of the short story as a form in the United States, which was a process mediated and galvanised by the literary magazine The New Yorker, the natural habitat of writers such as John O’Hara and Maeve Brennan and, later, Elizabeth Cullinan. The chapter then discusses the expansion of the Irish-American literary canon from mid-century onwards and explores how key figures such as Edward McSorley, James T. Farrell, Mary McCarthy and Mary Gordon sought to engage with or contest influential Irish and Irish-American literary inheritances. These writers’ commitment to social realism invented a new version of Irish-America during these decades of cultural transition, one that often deliberately set itself apart from previous received scripts and mythmaking.