Christy Brown - Literary Legacy

Literary Legacy

Brown's self-proclaimed masterpiece, Down all the Days, was an ambitious project drawn largely from a playful expansion of My Left Foot; it also became an international bestseller and published translations exist in fourteen languages. The Irish Times reviewer Bernard Share claimed the work was "...the most important Irish novel since Ulysses." Like Joyce, Brown employed the stream-of-consciousness technique and sought to document Dublin's culture through the use of humour, accurate dialects and intricate character description. Down All the Days was followed by a series of other novels, including A Shadow on Summer (1972), Wild Grow the Lilies (1976) and A Promising Career (published posthumously in 1982). He also published three poetry collections, including Come Softly to My Wake, Background Music and Of Snails and Skylarks. All the works are now available in the compendium The Collected Poems of Christy Brown.