Marking New Editions of Mortal Friends (1978) and Supply of Heroes (1986)

In casting his eye back across four decades to his early novels about the Irish Rising in the old country and the Irish arrival in America, James Carroll considers what he wrote, when he wrote it, and why? Supply of Heroes, challenging the creation myth of Irish Republicanism, was written. At the same time, the secret Hume-Adams talks anticipated the Anglo-Irish Agreement and all that followed. Mortal Friends celebrates the Boston Irish for refusing to settle for immigrant inequality, even as they became the city’s champions of intolerance. The late John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction (1978) was contested, but for Carroll, these novels are a particularly Irish mode of moral reckoning.

Yet now what? In this lecture, he asks — where, actually, was the romance; where was the fantasy, and what happened less to the lost home than to the idea of it? A close look at one writer’s work for the sake of a larger understanding of the Irish-American story and the maze-like methods of the story itself.

James Carroll has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School; The Richman Visiting Professor at Brandeis University; holder of the McDonald Chair at Emory University; a trustee of the Boston Public Library; a member of the Dean’s Council at the Harvard Divinity School; Distinguished-Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University; and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at The Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Associate of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Carroll holds honorary degrees from, among others, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Suffolk University, Brandeis University, Lehigh University, and Claremont Graduate University.

Time: 7:00 PM — 8:15 PM EST

Free!

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