The death has occurred in San Francisco of the Irish-American writer Thomas Flanagan, author of The Year of the French. He died of a heart attack.
Flanagan, who was born in 1923, was best known for that novel, about the rebellion of 1798, which was published in 1979 and won the National Book Critics' Circle award for fiction. He died last Thursday.
As a student he had won praise, and prizes, for mystery stories and later published two other novels, The Tenants of Time (1988), and The End of the Hunt (1994), both on historical themes, the Fenian rising of 1867 and the 1916 Rising and its aftermath.
He earned his PhD in 1958 at Columbia University and taught literature for 18 years at the University of California at Berkeley. Later he was professor at New York University at Stony Brook.
Flanagan, who was a regular visitor to Ireland to teach and research, had an extensive knowledge of Irish literature and published The Irish Novelists 1800-1850 in 1954.
He married Mary Helen Bonner, who died in 1949. They had two children.
