Thomas Flanagan, a professor who turned a flash of
inspiration into a prize-winning historical novel of Ireland, then
followed it with two more acclaimed books in the same vein, died on
March 21 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 78.
The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter, Caitlin Flanagan.
Mr. Flanagan taught literature at the University of
California at Berkeley in the mid-1970's when he had the epiphany that
led to his first novel, ''The Year of the French'' (Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1979). As he often told the story, he was in his office
staring at a pad of paper, waiting for his wife, Jean, to pick him up
because he did not drive.
''He just suddenly had a vision of a person walking
down a road, and that is when he became a novelist,'' said Barbara
Dupee, a friend whose husband, F. W. Dupee, had taught with Mr. Flanagan
at Columbia University in the 1950's. The fellow on the road was a poet
named Owen Ruagh MacCarthy, and the image turned into the opening
chapter of ''The Year of the French,'' a sprawling tale of Ireland's
doomed uprising against the British in 1798.
''I haven't so enjoyed a historical novel since 'The
Charterhouse of Parma' and 'War and Peace,' '' John Leonard wrote in
his review in The New York Times.
The book was no glossy version of Ireland spun from
the comfort of an American campus. It was a stark and sometimes brutal
account of the uprising, which began when British landlords, lured by
higher profits, converted farms to grazing and evicted the tenants.
''The Year of the French'' won the National Critics
Circle award for fiction. Mr. Flanagan followed it in 1988 with ''The
Tenants of Time'' (Dutton), which begins in 1867. The third book in the
loose trilogy was ''The End of the Hunt'' (1994, Dutton), which brought
the tale into the early 20th century. In a review in The Times, Terence
Brown called that book ''a significant contribution to the historical
interpretation of the period.''
Thomas Flanagan was born on Nov. 5, 1923, in
Greenwich, Conn. His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker; all
four of his grandparents had come to the United States from County
Fermanagh.
He dominated the high school newspaper in Greenwich
along with his friend Truman Capote. He interrupted his education at
Amherst to serve with the Pacific Fleet, returned to complete his
undergraduate work there, then went on to receive a master's degree and
Ph.D. at Columbia. In 1949 he married Jean Parker, a nurse, who died
last year. He is survived by Caitlin, of Los Angeles; another daughter,
Ellen Klavan of Santa Barbara, Calif.; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Flanagan made a start toward his literary career
early, writing stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. At the same
time he settled into a teaching post in Columbia's English department
while doing his doctoral work, encountering heady intellectual times
there -- Lionel Trilling was an adviser -- and publishing a scholarly
work, ''The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850,'' in 1959.
In 1960 he moved to Berkeley, and into heady times
of a different sort on that tumultuous campus. About this time he and
his wife also began making annual trips to Ireland, Mr. Flanagan
striking up friendships with writers like Seamus Heaney.
In 1978 Mr. Flanagan switched campuses again, to the
State University of New York at Stonybrook. He retired in 1996 and
returned to Berkeley. In retirement he continued to write essays and
criticism for publications that included The Times and The New York
Review of Books, which is preparing to publish a collection of his
essays in book form.
Mr. Flanagan once described his affection for
Ireland this way: ''It is not the romantic, rather sentimental Ireland
of many Irish-Americans that I love, but the actual Ireland, a complex,
profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and
some dark.''
Photo: Thomas Flanagan (Jerry Bauer)
