Unknown to many, Fitzgerald is also a patriot. In 1916 he is a member of the Irish Volunteers and is prepared to fight in the Easter Rising on Easter Sunday when the orders are countermanded. On Easter Monday the revolution is on again, and Shields goes to the Abbey Theatre and retrieves his rifle from under the stage. He goes around the corner to Liberty Hall and joins with James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army.
Fitzgerald goes to Hollywood to star in another O’Casey work, The Plough and the Stars (1936), directed by John Ford. He has a successful Hollywood career in such films as The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), And Then There Were None (1945), The Naked City (1948), and The Quiet Man (1952). Fitzgerald achieves a feat unmatched in the history of the Academy Awards. He is nominated for both the Best Actor Oscar and the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the same performance, as Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way (1944). He wins the Best Supporting Actor Award. This feat will likely never be matched as the Academy Award rules have since been changed to prevent this. During World War II, Oscar statues are made of plaster rather than gold due to wartime metal shortages. Being an avid golfer, Fitzgerald later breaks the head off his Oscar statue while practicing his golf swing.
Fitzgerald has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for films located at 6220 Hollywood Blvd. and one for television located at 7001 Hollywood Blvd.
Fitzgerald returns to live in Dublin in 1959. He dies of heart failure on January 14, 1961, and is buried at Deansgrange Cemetery in Dublin.
Joyce is born on February 2, 1882, in the wealthy Rathgar suburb of Dublin. The family is initially well off as Dublin merchants with bloodlines that connected them to old Irish nobility in the country. James’ father, John Stanislaus Joyce, is a fierce Irish Catholic patriot and his political and religious influences are most evident in Joyce’s two key works A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922).
The Joyce family is repeatedly forced to move to more modest residences due to their steadily diminishing wealth and income. John Joyce’s habitual unemployment as well as his drinking and spending habits make it difficult for the Joyces to retain their social standing. As a young man, Joyce is sent away to the renowned Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare in 1888, a Jesuit institution regarded as the best preparatory school in Ireland. The Clongowes school figures prominently in Joyce’s work, specifically in the story of his recurring character Stephen Dedalus. Joyce earns high marks both at the Clongowes School and at Belvedere College in Dublin where he continues his education. At this point in his life, it seems evident that Joyce is to enter the priesthood, a decision that would please his parents. However, as Joyce makes contact with various members of the Irish Literary Renaissance, his interest in the priesthood wanes. Joyce becomes increasingly critical of Ireland and its conservative elements, especially the Church.
Against his mother’s wishes, Joyce leaves Ireland in 1902 to pursue a medical education in Paris and does not return until the following year upon receiving news of his mother’s debilitation and imminent death. After burying his mother, Joyce continues to stay in Ireland, working as a schoolteacher at a boys’ school, another autobiographical detail that recurs in the story of Stephen Dedalus. After barely spending a year in Dublin, Joyce returns to the Continent, drifting in and out of medical school in Paris before taking up residence in Zurich. It is during this period that Joyce begins writing professionally.
In 1905, Joyce completes a collection of eight stories entitled Dubliners, although it is not actually printed until 1913. During these frustrating and impoverished years, Joyce heavily relies upon the emotional support of Nora Barnacle, his unmarried Irish lover, as well as the financial support of his younger brother, Stanislaus Joyce. Both Nora and Stanislaus remain as protective, supporting figures for the duration of Joyce’s life. During the eight years between Dubliners‘ completion and publication, Joyce and Barnacle have two children, a son named Giorgio, and a daughter named Lucia.
Joyce’s next major work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, appears in serialized form in 1914 and 1915. Joyce is “discovered” by Ezra Pound and the complete text is printed in New York City in 1916, and in London in 1917. It is with the assistance of Pound, a prominent literary figure of the time, that Joyce comes into contact with Harriet Shaw Weaver, who serves as both editor and patron while Joyce writes Ulysses.
When Ulysses is published in Paris in 1922, many immediately hail the work as genius. With his inventive narrative style and engagement with multiple philosophical themes, Joyce has established himself as a leading Modernist. The novel charts the passage of one day, June 16, 1904, as depicted in the life of an Irish Jew named Leopold Bloom, who plays the role of a Ulysses by wandering through the streets of Dublin. Despite the fact that Joyce is writing in self-imposed exile, living in Paris, Zurich, and Trieste while writing Ulysses, the novel is noted for the incredible amount of accuracy and detail regarding the physical and geographical features of Dublin.
Similar in theme to Joyce’s previous works, Ulysses examines the relationship between the modern man and his myth and history, focusing on contemporary questions of Irish political and cultural independence, the effects of organized religion on the soul, and the cultural and moral decay produced by economic development and heightened urbanization. While Joyce is writing it, there is serious doubt as to whether Ulysses will be completed. Midway through his writing, Joyce undergoes the first of eleven eye operations to salvage his ever-worsening eyesight. At one point, a disappointed Joyce casts the bulk of his manuscript into the fire, but Nora Barnacle immediately rescues it.
While Ulysses is hailed by some, the novel is banned in both the United Kingdom and the United States on obscenity charges. It is not until 1934 that Random House wins a court battle that grants permission to print and distribute Ulysses in the United States. The novel is legalized in Britain two years later.
By this time, Joyce is approaching the end of his public career and has concluded work on his final novel, Finnegan’s Wake (1939). Considered to be far more baffling and convoluted than Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake is a critical failure. At the outbreak of World War II, Joyce remains in Paris until he is forced to move, first to Vichy, and then to Switzerland. On January 13, 1941, Joyce dies of a stomach ulcer at the age of 58 and is buried in Zurich’s Fluntern Cemetery.
Major Thomas Buchanan McGuire, Jr., the second highest scoring United States ace of World War II and winner of the Medal of Honor, is shot down and killed over the Pacific on January 7, 1945.
McGuire is an Irish American born in Ridgewood, New Jersey on August 1, 1920. He spends most of his childhood in Sebring, Florida, where he and his mother move after his parents are divorced.
McGuire enlists in the army as a aviation cadet in July 1941 and earns his pilot’s wings in February 1942. Sent to Alaska, McGuire bristles at the lack of combat and requests a transfer to a combat squadron. In December he is sent to California to learn to fly the twin-engine P-38 Lightning in which he earns his fame. In March 1943 he ships out to the Pacific, joining the 49th Fighter Group. One of the veteran combat pilots in the 49th is Richard Bong, who becomes the highest scoring ace of World War II.
In just his second mission, on August 18, McGuire is credited with shooting down three Japanese planes. On his next mission, on the 21st, he shoots down two more, making him an ace after just three missions. In October he is shot down but manages to bail out over the ocean and is rescued by a PT boat. When he takes off from his base in the Philippines on Christmas day 1944, he has thirty-one kills. In the next two days he shoots down seven enemy planes to bring his total to thirty-eight, putting him only two behind Bong, who has been sent home for a fund-raising tour. McGuire is anxious to pass him.
Early on the morning of January 7, McGuire leads a flight of four P-38s over Japanese airbases on Negros Island. The group is confronted by a lone Ki-43 “Oscar.” As the Japanese fighter approaches from behind, McGuire makes an extremely sharp turn to the left. This extremely dangerous maneuver, performed at an altitude of only 300 feet, causes McGuire’s P-38 to stall. It snap rolls inverted and noses down into the ground. Despite the low altitude, McGuire nearly pulls out successfully. Had he jettisoned his drop tanks at the start of the dogfight, he might have managed it, however McGuire is killed on impact.
A memorial, placed by aviation archaeologist and former fighter pilot David Mason in 2007, stands at McGuire’s fatal crash site on Negros Island as a tribute. McGuire is posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his seven kills in two days in December. He is memorialized by the renaming of Fort Dix Army Air Force Base in Burlington County, New Jersey, to McGuire Air Force Base in 1948.
seamus dubhghaill 