Christy Brown Biography

Irish novelist and poet, born in Dublin, the son of a bricklayer and one of twenty-three children. A victim of cerebral palsy, he was able to write only with the aid of his left foot, which he used to operate a specially adapted typewriter. My Left Foot (1954), an autobiography describing his fight to overcome his disability, was later made into an award-winning film; it was followed by an autobiographical novel, Down All the Days (1970), which is set, like much of his work, in Dublin. His second novel, A Shadow on Summer (1974), follows its protagonist, a crippled writer, Riley McCombe, to America, where he becomes involved with a beautiful photographer. Wild Grow the Lilies (1976) described the peregrinations around Dublin of an Irish journalist in search of a story. A Promising Career, a novel set in London and concerning a young couple caught up in the corrupt world of the recording industry, and Collected Poems, were published posthumously in 1982.