The Ginger Man [Paperback]

J.P. Donleavy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1988

This is the dramatic story of J. P. Donleavy's personal struggle to create and publish a book that became a twentieth-century masterpiece: The Ginger Man. It is literary history combined with Donleavy's autobiography - from his childhood in the Bronx, education at Catholic schools, service in the U.S. Navy, and travels, to his current life as proprietor of a landed estate in the midlands of Ireland. Trinity College in Dublin after World War II was a mecca for adventurous Americans who used the G.I. Bill as a passport to higher education. Among them were able-bodied seaman second class J. P. "Mike" Donleavy, fighter pilot George Roy Hill (now a celebrated Hollywood director), and naval yeoman Gainor Stephen Crist, a midwestern rara avis and model for the Ginger Man. Student life included degrees in debauchery; drunken brawls in Dublin pubs; comic capers with the playwright Brendan Behan; eccentric Anglo-Irish aristocrats; living on miraculous credit and in constant debt with plenty of time for the seduction of nice Catholic girls. Donleavy, impecunious and newly married, began to write The Ginger Man in a primitive isolated cottage at Kilcoole. He completed the book over a period of four years on two continents. The Ginger Man was rejected by nearly thirty-five American and British publishers. The book was finally published in Paris in 1955 by Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press as a work of pornography. Twenty-five years of bitter litigation between Donleavy and Girodias followed, with Donleavy emerging triumphant as sole owner of Olympia and its copyrights, including that of The Ginger Man. Since its traumatic birth, The Ginger Man has become a contemporary classic, translated intomany languages, with millions of copies sold throughout the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

It is one of the books which reveals their quality from the first line. On every page there is that immediacy all good writing has.

Review

There are a few novelists who are writing out of a sense of what the contemporary world is all about. The best of them is J. P. Donleavy. -- The New York Times Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 347 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr; First Edition. first thus edition (July 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871131994
• ISBN-13: 978-0871131997
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Creation, September 23, 1999

By 

Jason Baer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ginger Man (Paperback)

CAUTION: This book is not for everyone (ie--if you expect your reading to provide a strong moral and ethical paradigm, might as well skip this book). If, however, you can enjoy a book about a boozing expatriot in Ireland who disregards all responsibilities (including his family) and owes money to everyone he has come into contact with, then read on. This is not to say that Donleavy necessarily endorses a life of drinking and whoring, he is merely writing about it (more drinking than whoring). Fans of literature, this book cannot be ignored. Donleavy breaks every rule in the book with his poetic sensibilites. He writes with a flourish and a sense of imagery that is both uncommon and incredible. I cannot say that I have much regard for the modern library or their lists, but I can see why they included this book in their "Top 100 Books of the 20th Century in the English Language." This is a book I will not easily forget.

37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funnier than Catch-22 or Bombardiers, and with more drama, March 31, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ginger Man (Paperback)

Quite simply, one of the five funniest books of all time, I rate this alongside Confederacy of Dunces, Catch-22, Bombardiers, and Vonnegut's best work. It tells the story of an usually drunken American, Sebastian Dangerfield, studying at Trinity College, Dublin, and his trials and tribulations of him, his wife and friends, colleagues, and fellow drinkers. Written in 1965 and hailed as "A triumph of comic writing..." by The New Yorker it is crying-out-loud funny. The scene where Sebastian tries to buy condoms in 1960s Ireland is alone worth the price of the book. Friends raved about this for years, and I'm still kicking myself for waiting this long to read it. The best story I've ever seen about contemporary man trying to find pleasure in life without working in any sense of the word. I am more apt to give comedies a one, but this is definitely a ten

40 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beastly lyrical, February 16, 2005

By 

Wordsworth (Greenwich, CT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Ginger Man (Paperback)

JPD launched a storied literary career with a masterpiece in The Ginger Man. Sebastian, which means "venerable," is a man perpetually on the brink of utter madness brought largely upon himself. He is a Trinity College Dublin man whose condition is given to "staving off starvation" and whose only option when things always get worse is to "cheer-up or die." When you consider that JPD was first a painter, it's understandable that his writing style is pointillistic. The syntax like Dangerfield is non-traditional presented like life itself in fragments of which to make sense. His little lines of stacked type at the end of each chapter are works of art in themselves: "All the way/From the land/Of Kerry/Is a man/From the dead/Gone merry./ This man/Stood in the street/ And stamped his feet/ And no one heard him." Here the work winds from prose to poetry to create an endearing human quality and even tenderness that enables us to forgive the ginger man for his outrageousness. What would he and his poor as Pozzo crones do with a lot of money? Drink at every pub from College Green to Kerry over the course of a year and then "I'll arrive on Dingle Peninsula walk out on the end of Slea Head, beat, wet and penniless. I'll sit there and weep into the sea." Very Dylan Thomas. A touch Kafkaesque. Joycean. JPD's Ginger Man is worthy of a higher position on Random House's "Best Novels of the 20th Century." His body of work, including "Darcy Dancer," "Balthazar B," "The Singluar Man," "The Onion Eaters," "Wrong Info at Princeton" and "Samuel S." is astonishing in its lyric virtuosity, power and originality. When will the mavens of Hollywood treat us to tales by JPD that shimmer and dance upon the silverscreen? And when will the good people in Stockholm see the light on JPD's vast, rich, enduring, literary legacy?