The Edge of Sadness
By Edwin O'Connor

664 Pages • $13.95

The Edge of Sadness
By Edwin O'Connor

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

The Edge of Sadness became a best seller in the 1960s in part because of its scandalous elements. Edwin O’Connor took direct aim at the popular stereotype of the Catholic priest in America: the super-competent and authoritarian but lovable leader, the wise counselor, gregarious extrovert, and heroic celibate (who could nevertheless flirt with the ladies).

Father Hugh Kennedy, the central character of The Edge of Sadness, is a listless, heartsick recovering alcoholic. He is trying to renew his priesthood in a decaying inner-city parish, but he can’t connect with his immigrant flock. He’s tormented by his past. He looks on the future with apprehension. This is no Bing Crosby, playing the enchanting Father Chuck O’Malley in Going My Way.

O’Connor presents his dyspeptic vision of American Catholicism with considerable literary skill. The Edge of Sadness won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1962, and the novel is cherished for its psychological perception, memorable characters, and spiritual insight. O’Connor was challenging more than stereotypes about priests. He didn’t buy the cheerful story that the self-assured Irish-dominated American Catholic Church told about itself. Beneath the facade of poise and confidence was a world of loneliness, lost ideals, selfishness, and bleakness of soul. Father Kennedy’s parish is intended as a metaphor for the church as a whole:

This is not the kind of parish in which a great rapport obtains between the shepherd and his flock. We are all more or less strangers to one another. And most of all, I’m afraid, I’m a stranger in this smallest and dreariest part of my parish where—all moving pictures to the contrary—I can assure you that the priest is not this legendary, revered, and welcome figure, capable of healing with a glance.

By exploring the complicated, often ignored problems within American Catholicism, The Edge of Sadness seems to anticipate the tumultuous period that lay just around the corner, when Pope John XXIII would call for a Vatican Council II to update and renew the church.

The Edge of Sadness is suffused with nostalgia of another kind—nostalgia for the vanishing Irish culture that deeply influenced American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. O’Connor etches this in his vivid portrait of the large Carmody family, whose involvement with Father Kennedy constitutes much of the plot of the novel. Charlie Carmody, the wealthy eighty-one-year-old patriarch, epitomizes the old garrulous authoritarian style, but his children gradually become estranged from him. They aren’t Irish anymore. They have become Americans: busy, impatient, modern.

At a Carmody party, Father Kennedy watches Charlie and his cronies talk.

It was the same talk with which I had grown up, the talk that belonged, really, to another era, and that now must have been close to disappearing, the talk of old men and old women for whom the simple business of talking had always been the one great recreation. And so the result was the long, winding, old-fashioned parade of extraordinary reminiscence and anecdote and parochial prejudice and crotchety improbable behavior . . . the newer, smoother tolerances had not yet arrived.

At the end of The Edge of Sadness, Father Kennedy is visited by grace. The bishop offers him a new assignment, but he chooses to stay in his dreary, down-at-the-heels parish. He understands he will be there for the rest of his life, something he feels with “a touch of regret, an edge of sadness.” But sadness is only at the edge. Inside is restored hope that his vocation will be renewed, that he will serve the people well as their priest.

Perhaps Father Hugh Kennedy’s renewal is a metaphor for a larger renewal of the church. Edwin O’Connor perceived that a troubled church contains within itself the seeds of conversion.

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About the Author

Edwin O’Connor was born in 1918 in Providence, Rhode Island, and was raised, along with two siblings, in Woonsocket, where his father practiced medicine. O’Connor was educated by the Christian Brothers in high school and attended the University of Notre Dame. There, he majored in English and was deeply influenced by his professor Frank O’Malley, to whom The Edge of Sadness is dedicated.

After graduating from Notre Dame, O’Connor served in the Coast Guard for three years. Before and after his service, O’Connor worked as a radio announcer in several cities, including Providence and Boston. He began writing while he was in the Coast Guard, and his first published short story, “The Gentle Perfect Knight,” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1947. Subsequent stories were published in the Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere, and O’Connor worked as a television critic as well.

O’Connor’s first novel, The Oracle, came out in 1951. His most commercially successful novel, The Last Hurrah, was published in 1956. This story of Frank Skeffington, an Irish American politician in Boston, won the Atlantic Prize and was made into a film directed by John Ford and starring Spencer Tracy.

Benjy, O’Connor’s next novel, was published in 1957, followed by The Edge of Sadness (1961), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962. A play and novel, I Was Dancing, and the novel All in the Family (1966) followed.

In 1962, O’Connor married Veniette Caswell Weil. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 23, 1968, in Boston.

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Links for Edwin O'Connor

Critical essay and bibliographic information on The Edge of Sadness

Essay on Edwin O’Connor, by Ralph McInerny

“A Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O’Connor,” by Joseph Bottum

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