“Literature and the Hack”: Brendan Behan and the Newspapers

Abstract

: Between 1951 and 1956, Brendan Behan published more than one hundred articles in The Irish Press newspaper, which have now been collected into a single volume, A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose . The collection augments the critical appreciation of Behan’s talents as a writer, but it also raises important questions for the late modernist period of writing, about the relationship between “Literature,” as a distinct and valued art form