The Selected Essays of Sean O'FaolainSean OFaolain (1900 1991) was Irelands leading social and political critic in the period following the countrys independence from the United Kingdom. Since his death, scholarly opinion has alternately cast him as an arch revisionist, a liberal nationalist, and a frustrated republican. The Selected Essays of Sean OFaolain reassesses his reputation by showing that he wrote in the tradition of post Enlightenment European intellectuals, and that while he