December 15, 1930

Edna O'Brien (December 15, 1930 ) in her story, "Inner Cowboy," sketches the short life of an Irish lad from a rural area. The story opens with a description of that country with:

'...the pots and wheelbarrows in the backyard, the magpies lined up on the chimney stacks, and the cat, pleased with herself after her fill of mice and bats in the night-- black night people called it. That cat was runover and got renamed, "Lucky to be alive," and had a ridge in her tail...'

Saints and Sinners, the volume in which this story appears, (2011) won the "Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award."

Edna O'Brien's background does not explain her genius, although it might her impetus to write. Here is how an Paris Review article about her starts:

'Edna O’Brien was born in the west of Ireland in a small village she describes as “enclosed, fervid, and bigoted.” Literature was taboo, and those books that penetrated the parish were loaned by the page. O’Brien’s father was a farmer who “carried on in that glorious line of profligate Irishmen.” Her mother, who had worked as a maid in Brooklyn, always yearned to return to America. O’Brien’s childhood was unhappy, but she believes it gave her both the need and the impetus to write. “Writing,” she says, “is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.”