Niall Sheridan

As a student at University College Dublin he cofounded the journal Blather with O'Nolan and his brother Ciaran O'Nolan.[1] Sheridan was one of the founders of the so-called "Cult of Joyce" at UCD, which also included O'Nolan, Denis Devlin, Donagh MacDonagh, and other latterly influential writers.[2]

While a student, Sheridan shared a room with MacDonagh in Rathmines, in a house featuring a Great Dane named Thor and numerous visits from other aspirant writers, artists, and thinkers.[3] Charles Donnelly was a particularly frequent guest. Sheridan and MacDonagh published a book titled Twenty Poems (they contributed ten each), which Colm Ó Lochlainn printed in a limited edition of 300 copies in 1934.[3][4]

Sheridan remained close to O'Nolan, and the two conspired on provocations on the letters pages of the Irish Times.[1] At the same time, with other UCD friends at Grogan's Pub in Dublin, they were making plans for a literary revolution in the form of a collaboratively written political novel (never completed) to be titled Children of Destiny.[5] Sheridan is represented closely by the character of Brinsley in O'Nolan's At Swim-Two-Birds, a highly literate fellow student of the narrator described as "an intellectual Meath-man; given to close-knit epigrammatic talk."[6][7] Many details of Sheridan's life and work were incorporated into O'Nolan's novel, including his early translations of Catullus (featured in Twenty Poems).[8] Following the book's publication, Sheridan brought it to James Joyce in Paris, though Joyce told him he had already read it.[9]

In 1949, Sheridan and O'Nolan published, anonymously, an interview with John Stanislaus Joyce, James Joyce's father.[10] The authenticity of this interview was later doubted, and it was chalked up as one of O'Nolan's many literary pranks.[11] Nevertheless, Sheridan insisted to Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann that the interview had happened, and the question remains unsettled.[10]

In 1939, Sheridan married Monica Treanor, a chef. Like Monica, Sheridan became a broadcaster, working on the show Information Please for Radio Éireann.[12] After the broadcaster, now Raidió Teilifís Éireann, expanded into television, Sheridan contributed such works as a teleplay titled "A Dog's Life" and several productions about O'Nolan/O'Brien.[13][14][15] Sheridan continued to be active in the literary world, often on behalf of the friends of his youth; in 1950, for example, he published an introduction to Devlin's "The Heavenly Foreigner" in Poetry Ireland, noting that "on careful reading, superficial obscurities vanish."[16] Following MacDonagh's death in 1968, Sheridan wrote a preface for his poetry collection A Warning to Conquerors.[17] He worked occasionally on his own pieces as well, and his play Seven Men and a Dog was performed by the Abbey Theatre in 1958.[18]