Robert Hogan : 1930-1999
Irish theatrical studies suffered a great loss on 5th March 1999 with the death of Robert Hogan-a prolific scholar and critic and an enthusiastic and effective supporter of Irish writing from the moment of his first descent on Dublin to pursue research on Sean O'Casey. Born in Boonville, Missouri, Bob's university career passed at Minneapolis and Delaware at each of which universities he magisterially summoned into existence an Irish publishing dimension which he later perpetuated under the Proscenium imprint. Following his Experiments of Sean O'Casey (1960) he edited O'Casey's incidental writings as Feathers from the Green Crow (1962) - a publication of Missouri UP which was taken on by Macmillan in 1963 - and then embarked on large-scale Irish literary history with After the Irish Renaissance (1968), a 'critical history' of Irish drama from O'Casey's Plough onwards. In 1968-70, with Michael J. O'Neill, he edited three volumes of Joseph Holloway's invaluable playgoing diaries covering the period 1926-44 following his own one-volume selection from this source in 1967. During the same year he edited Seven Irish plays 1946-1964, a lasting monument in the field. In 1970 he edited the dramatic criticism of Frank J. Fay for Liam Miller's Dolmen Press-forming with Miller an important partnership that led on to six volumes of his "Documentary History of Modern Irish Drama" between 1975 and 1992, conducted with assistance from James Kilroy and Richard Burnham. Since O'Casey (1983), a collection of essays on modern Irish drama, was brought out by Colin Smythe.
Between 1972-94, Hogan edited the Journal of Irish Literature which he founded as a venue for Irish writers as much as Irish criticism, and which came to include contributions from contemporary dramatists such as J. B. Keane, Thomas Murphy, and Frank McGuinness, as well neglected Irish authors of the period such as Mervyn Wall, and even earlier writers such as Conal O'Riordan and Gerald MacNamara, as well as the "punster" Thomas Sheridan "the Punster"-father of RBS and a personal favourite of Hogan's. In the same period his Proscenium Press brought out a series of 'Lost Plays' of the Irish Revival. His Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979) was first of a new species of bio-critical reference work drawing together numerous contributors under a broadly-agreed format. Hogan himself contributed very many entries and a striking historical and critical Introduction; and while some of the short newer notices were dismissive of writers who later achieved distinction (such as Sebastian Barry), the book continues to provide essential guidance on the whole range of Irish writings in its enlarged two-volume edition of 1996. Monographs on Arthur Miller (1964), Mervyn Wall (1972) and Eimar O'Duffy (1972) as well as innumerable articles and essays in Irish and other journals of literary scholarship complete an astounding curriculum vitae.
All of this amounts to an extraordinary contribution to Irish literary studies, driven by a passion for the subject and by a degree of literary patriotism that Bob Hogan's unfailing good manners and easy nature sometimes belied. His instinctive ability to unearth manuscripts and texts together with his considerable gift for the 'management of men' resulted in an donation to Irish dramatic scholarship unequalled in his generation. Bob's regular visits to Ireland became a fixture when he settled in Bray, Co. Wicklow, during the 1980s with his gifted and intelligent second wife Mary Rose Callaghan, to whom we extend our profound sympathies at her great personal loss.