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Octavo. IV, 768 pages. Hardcover / Original Half-leather with gilt lettering on spine. Binding in poor but still good + condition with some stronger signs of wear, spine starting, mild foxing throughout and some faded damp-staining to the outer paper-margins inside only. Endpaper, Half-title and titlepage slightly detached. This is the very rare inaugural Atlantic Volume with a wonderful irish provenance, possibly even a relation to Fitz-James O'Brien. The Atlantic is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston as The Atlantic Monthly, a literary and cultural magazine that published leading writers' commentary on education, the abolition of slavery, and other major political issues of that time. Its founders included Francis H. Underwood and prominent writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. James Russell Lowell was its first editor. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the magazine also published the annual The Atlantic Monthly Almanac. (Wikipedia) _________________________________ O'Brien, Fitz-James (1828 62), writer, was born Michael Fitzjames O'Brien in Cork, the only child of James O'Brien (1780 1839), county coroner, and his wife Eliza, daughter of Michael O'Driscoll of Baltimore, Co. Cork. They were well off and lived at 58 South Mall, Cork city. Eliza's father was a wealthy landowner from an old, well established family, and was known locally as The O'Driscoll . His grandson, always called Fitzjames (which he later wrote as Fitz-James ) was his sole heir. After James O'Brien's death (c.1839), his widow, a noted beauty, married a wealthy Corkman, De Courcy O'Grady. They settled in Castleconnell, Co. Limerick, and Fitzjames was educated privately and enjoyed an active, sporting life. His first published poem was inspired by the famine and advocated escaping English tyranny by flight to America. Charles Gavan Duffy (qv) published it in The Nation (15 March 1845) under the caustic introduction: This might be called The Coward's Resource . Undeterred, O'Brien continued to send in verse under pseudonyms such as Heremon and Fineen Dhuv . His most celebrated poem was the romantic I know a lake , which appeared on 26 July 1845. Its (unattributed) inclusion in Edward Hayes's popular The ballads of Ireland (1855) ensured it lasting fame. From July 1848 he also contributed to the Cork Magazine and sent patriotic verse to the Irishman. O'Brien always claimed (falsely) to have attended TCD. He probably spent some time in France, as he was fluent in the language. On his twenty-first birthday in 1849 he came into his inheritance of around £8,000 and left for London. There he ran through his money in two years of luxurious living. He had work published in the Metropolitan and the Parlour magazines but later complained of the difficulty of breaking into literary London. His first story, The phantom light , made good use of Irish peasant superstition and appeared in the Home Companion. Afterwards he seldom used Irish settings in his stories and turned his back on his earlier patriotism. American friends noted that he seemed ashamed of his nationality and was delighted when mistaken for an Englishman. After an unhappy love affair with the wife of an officer, he left London penniless at the end of 1851 for New York. He never returned, never again lived within his means, and never again fell in love, although he had numerous affairs. O'Brien's entrée into New York's literary scene was swift and successful. He first contributed to the Lantern, a comic magazine established by a fellow Irishman, the actor John Brougham (qv). For this he provided an autobiographical sketch of himself as The sentimental poet : of medium height, with large eyes, large nose.
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