The ‘Lost Book’ of Conor Cruise O’brien

This article reconstructs the context in which the manuscript of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ‘lost book’ came to be written and the unfruitful effort to get it into the public domain. Through an examination of documentary evidence held in the National Archives of Ireland, it is shown that previous accounts have been wide of the mark. The attribution of sole authorship of the manuscript to O’Brien is challenged, replacing it with the idea that the text was a collective endeavour. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that Joseph Brennan, a counsellor at the Irish Embassy in Washington, DC, rather than O’Brien was the driving force behind the supposed ‘lost book of O’Brien’, and especially in later efforts to revive the work. It is hoped that future scholars will make claims about O’Brien’s ‘lost book’ and its potential implications for his early thought with greater circumspection than has hitherto been the case.