The Big Fellow. Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution. Dublin: Clonmore, 1965. Revised Edition. Pp xii, 190. A fine bright copy in dust jacket.

Illustrated with plates.

A deeply personal and psychologically nuanced biography of Michael Collins, portraying the revolutionary leader not just as a political icon but as a complex, charismatic, and ultimately tragic figure.

Frank O’Connor—himself a former Anti-Treaty IRA member—approaches Collins with a mix of admiration, guilt, and literary sensitivity. The book spans Collins’s life from the 1916 Easter Rising to his assassination in 1922, focusing on his role in the Irish War of Independence and the fraught negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty.