The best books about Irish-American identity

The centenary of what has been called James Joyce's "Great Irish Novel," Ulysess, was in 2022.

I realized then that the centenary of the “Great American Novel,” The Great Gatsby, was looming and further realized that F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is arguably the “Great Diasporic Irish Novel” too. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a Catholic from Maryland. F. Scott tended to stress family connections to the Maryland elite through his paternal grandfather’s marriage into the Anglo-American establishment Scott family.

Although Fitzgerald discussed the Irish ancestry that embarrassed him as being on his “potato famine Irish” mother’s side alone, the direct Fitzgerald line in America was Irish too and went right back into late eighteenth-century Maryland. This pivotal fact was unincorporated into the author’s boasts regarding his deep roots in America.

In short: being Irish Catholic in America before the 1845 famine wave did not fit with commonplace ideas of Irish America, even for people of that origin!

The Great Gatsby, like much of Fitzgerald’s work, grapples with the complexity of Irishness in America and that identity’s troubled relationship to issues of race and “whiteness.”

Most telling for me in this regard is that in a 1933 letter to fellow-Irish American author, John O’Hara, Fitzgerald describes himself as “black Irish.” This phrase signaled his white cohort’s ambiguous placement within America’s complex of race, ethnicity, and class.

The title character of Fitzgerald’s renowned 1925 novel has been speculated to be Jewish or a light-skinned Black man “passing” as white. However, Gatsby’s ethnic and racial ambiguity is ultimately rooted in Fitzgerald’s anxiety regarding his own ancestry, which marks his novels in ways that remain quite neglected by readers and critics alike.

Like many Irish women, my mother and grandmother were obsessed with movie star Grace Kelly (who became Princess Grace of Monaco in 1956) and passed on that fascination to me.

I have long thought that important public women of Irish America such as Jackie Kennedy and Grace have not been given due consideration in surveys of Irish America, which tend to emphasize public men. Therefore, I love the biography, High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly, because it takes its glamorous subject seriously.

Spoto’s book goes beyond biographers’ usual emphasis on the glitter of Grace’s rise to princess to provide an intimate, respectful, and sympathetic portrait of the woman, the actor, the mother, the wife, and the very able representative of a small principality on the world stage.

Many assume that the Philadelphia-born Kelly was elite, but Spoto lays out that she was the granddaughter of a poor Mayo man born during the famine of 1845. Kelly’s veneer of glamor emerges in Spoto’s work as the endpoint of a multi-generation story that follows the broad contours of post-Famine Irish experience, though in the specific context of the socially, ethnically, and racially stratified city of Philadelphia.

Kelly’s royal wedding was one of the largest international media events of the 1950s: broadcast live, it was watched by 30 million people. Significantly, the globally visible ascent of the granddaughter of a poor Irish immigrant to the highest social status was also followed with possessive pride in Kelly’s ancestral Ireland. Nevertheless, what was patently as pivotal a moment to Ireland and Irish America as Kennedy’s election only four years later has gone unrecognized in “serious” historiography of Irish America.

Spoto stresses that Grace was a cultured woman with a deep interest in her Irish heritage: during her state visit to Ireland in 1961, she called at her grandfather’s former home, and in 1976, she purchased the small cottage and the surrounding smallholding. He further details that Grace’s widower, Prince Rainier, would go on to endow Monaco’s Irish Library in the princess’s name.

Altogether, Grace’s significance to Ireland and Irish America deserves the kind of serious attention Spoto’s book gives it.

If, like me, you want to read an account of Irish America that is incisive but that also makes you laugh out loud, then I can highly recommend Irish America: Coming into Clover.

Written by former Boston Globe staff writer Maureen Dezell, this sharp portrait of contemporary Catholic Irish America from an insider to the culture explodes every cliché. Irish America: Coming into Clover is accessible history at its best, but it doesn’t just examine the past.

Dezell also considers the status of post-1845 famine Irishness in contemporary America, which she sees as being in deep contrast (both socially and racially) to its former status: in the nineteenth century, the Irish were only conditionally “white” and were initially subject to hostility from American nativists.

Dezell stresses that today, by contrast, the Irish are among the most educated and affluent Americans. This polish is on display in Dezell’s own creative language: she coins “Eiresatz,” “a sentimental slur of imagined memories, fine feeling, and faux Irish talismans and traditions,” a term that conjoins “ersatz” and “Éire,” the word for “Ireland” in the country’s native language.

Dezell takes pains to cover the Irish community’s regional varieties, and also looks at the complicated status of the Catholic Church for Irish America now, as well as political tensions between new waves of Irish-born immigrants and more established cohorts.

Dezell’s attention to women in this popular history as well as her lack of sentimentality makes it a stand-out in popular works on Irish America. Irish America: Coming into Clover has long been my go-to gift for Irish friends and cousins trying to understand Irish America’s past and present!

I first encountered Noel Ignatiev’s ground-breaking and hugely influential book, How the Irish Became White, after I moved from Ireland to America to work at UConn.

I was electrified by its thesis and found it very helpful in thinking critically about Irish-American identity and history. After all, that had become my heritage too once I crossed the Atlantic.

Ignatiev opens by outlining how the Irish fled to America from a motherland under British occupation and a colonial caste system that dehumanized them.

He argues that in America the new immigrants embraced a hierarchy based on race, as a result of which the oppressed became the oppressors: for Ignatiev, the Irish assimilated by becoming more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists, gaining “whiteness” by refusing to make common cause with Black fellow workers.

How the Irish Became White challenges the dominant story of how the Irish succeeded in America, which could often be self-congratulatory. Moreover, it also challenges accounts of Irish identity in America that treat that history as though it occurred in a racial vacuum.

In Ignatiev’s telling, no history of race and racism in America is complete without paying deep attention to the role the Irish played in such systems. This centrality arises out of the peculiar journey they made from discriminated against “off-white” immigrants to bastions of the establishment in contemporary America.

Because it is such an iconoclastic work and challenges the too-simple old story that Irish success was achieved solely through grit, hard work, and ambition, I often assign How the Irish Became White when I teach graduate seminars on Irish-American culture and identity. It almost always opens up difficult but ultimately valuable conversations, which for me is the hallmark of a great book.

This Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times bestselling memoir was published in 1996 to global success and remains very influential; Angela’s Ashes almost certainly kick-started the massive boom in that genre in Ireland in recent years.

McCourt’s book fascinates me because it is a relatively recent example of what I believe to be the dominant story that the Irish in the Americas have told themselves for quite some time now. That story is one of initial poverty, marginalization, and “not-quite-whiteness” that is inevitably followed by the achievement of assimilation, unquestioned whiteness, and material success.

Born in Depression-era Brooklyn in 1930 to deeply poor Irish immigrants and raised in Limerick, Ireland, McCourt was already a well-respected New York public high-school teacher before he had a breakout smash with this memoir relatively late in life. Thus, he himself would appear to embody the commonplace story of Irish success.

McCourt writes beautifully about ultimately transcending the searing deprivation of his childhood in Ireland and America and making a career as a renowned educator in the public school system.

Like McCourt himself, Angela’s Ashes belongs equally to Ireland and America, and in many ways the memoir also speaks to a similar (though more recent) narrative of well-deserved success that contemporary Ireland tells itself. It is no coincidence that McCourt’s memoir gained huge visibility right at the point that his native country witnessed massive economic expansion.

The so-called “Celtic Tiger” boom led to Ireland becoming one of the wealthiest nations in the world today, despite the kind of searing poverty that was commonplace in the immediate decades after political independence in the 1920s. McCourt’s journey from abject beginnings to global prominence mirrored that of both Ireland (in recent decades) and Irish America (after the postwar Kelly and Kennedy era).

Altogether, Angela’s Ashes is a classic of the memoir genre that also fits within well-established Irish and Irish-American narratives of inevitable rise.