Brian Coffey - St Louis

St Louis

During the war, Coffey taught in schools in London and Yorkshire, leaving his young family in Dublin. After the war, he returned to Paris and completed his doctoral thesis on the idea of order in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. The family then moved so that Coffey could take up a teaching post at the Jesuit Saint Louis University. During this period, Coffey seems to have done very little if any creative writing as he focused mainly on philosophical work based on his thesis, publishing a number of essays in The Modern Schoolman. By the early 1950s, Coffey became uncomfortable for a number of reasons, including the nature of his work, his distance from Ireland and the pressures that inevitably came to bear on an academic who had previously associated with well-known left-wing writers in Paris. For these reasons, he began to look for a suitable opportunity to leave the United States, and resigned, possibly on a matter of academic principle, in 1952.