February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
He won’t be there to see 81-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy receive the first Eugene O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award. Daniel Cassidy, who wrote “How the Irish Invented Slang,” died of pancreatic cancer last October at age 65.
The author was in almost daily email contact up until the last day of his life, recalled his fellow author Michael Patrick MacDonald. “Danny stressed the need for something like this, a cooperative where people supported each other’s work,” he said.
The group that Cassidy helped inspire has committed itself to giving its award in O’Neill’s name on Nobel Prizewinner’s birthday, Oct. 16, every year.
“Eugene O’Neill is so loved and he’s such a celebrated American artist because he’s universal and his characters are universal. These are people with Irish names,” MacDonald said.
The inaugural event will take place on Oct. 16, 2009 in Rosie O’Grady’s, a few blocks north of Times Square, where O’Neill was born in a hotel 121 years ago.
Author and New York Times journalist Dan Barry will present the award to Kennedy. Other prominent guests include Pulitzer-, Tony- and Oscar-winning writer John Patrick Shanley and actors Matt Dillon and Michael O’Keefe.
One impetus for setting up the organization was to challenge a prevailing misconception in the media during last year’s presidential election.
“We kept hearing that working-class white ethnics – which often means Irish-American and Italian-American – are not going to vote for an African-American candidate,” MacDonald said.
The founders of the organization knew this to be untrue, from their own families or anecdotally from the families of friends. (MacDonald, fellow writers Peter Quinn, T.J. English, Malachy McCourt, Pete Hamill, singer Ashley Davis and documentary filmmaker Mary Pat Kelly comprise the founding board of directors.)
In MacDonald’s own family’s case, they were not so much from the working-class as the “underclass” and they were all supportive of Barack Obama, who eventually won the election on Nov. 2.
The first public act of the group was to take out a full-page ad in this newspaper backing Obama during the Democratic primary campaign. It was signed by 44 prominent Irish Americans involved in the arts.
Now that it’s a full fully-fledged non-profit, the IAW&A won’t be taking overtly political stands, but MacDonald and his colleagues remain dedicated to a progressive vision for America.
The author’s own first book – “All Souls” – is an extraordinary story of family tragedy, but it can be read as a political work, too.
“When bussing was enacted in South Boston [in 1974], we had the poorest whites pitted against the poorest blacks,” MacDonald said. “I felt that the class manipulation involved in bussing was never really dealt with very much publicly in the conversations.
“People in the suburbs were targeting Southie as this bastion of white racist supremacy, when basically all I saw was a neighborhood where people were in a lot of pain and people were really poor,” the author said.
Gangster and FBI informant Whitey Bulger was the father figure in a neighborhood where 75 percent of the households, like MacDonald’s, were on welfare and fatherless.
“This was kind of a hidden Irish America,” he said.
MacDonald’s mother, whose parents were from Donegal, supplemented the family income by playing the accordion in traditional Irish bands and the guitar in country bands.
She gave birth to 11 children. At 75, she still cares for a daughter who was crippled and suffered brain damage in a fall from a roof during a fight over pills. Her eighth child died in 1965 (the year before the author’s own birth) as a result of inadequate health services. Three other sons were killed in violent circumstances, while another was framed by corrupt cops on a murder charge at age 13.
Yet it’s his mother who got the family through the tragedies and who gets the reader through the book, he said of “All Souls,” which is enormously popular on campuses nationwide.
In the process, rather like O’Neill before him, the author tells a universal story through the voices of people with Irish names.
Young Latino and African-American adults often tell him: “This is my story.”
For more information about the IAW&A go to www.iamwa.com and for information about the Oct. 16 event go to www.oneillaward.org.