Thomas Flanagan, a professor who turned a flash of inspiration into a prize-winning historical novel of Ireland, then followed it with two more acclaimed books in the same vein, died March 21 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 78.
Mr. Flanagan taught literature at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1970s when he became inspired to write his first novel, “The Year of the French,” published in 1979. As he often told the story, he was in his office staring at a pad of paper, waiting for his wife, Jean, to pick him up.
“He just suddenly had a vision of a person walking down a road, and that is when he became a novelist,” said Barbara Dupee, a friend whose husband, F.W. Dupee, had taught with Mr. Flanagan at Columbia University in the 1950s.
The fellow on the road was a poet named Owen Ruagh MacCarthy, and the image turned into the opening chapter of “The Year of the French,” a tale of Ireland’s doomed uprising against the British in 1798.
The book was a stark and sometimes brutal account of the uprising, which began when British landlords, lured by higher profits, converted farms to grazing and evicted the tenants.
“The Year of the French” won the National Critics Circle award for fiction.
Mr. Flanagan followed it in 1988 with “The Tenants of Time,” which begins in 1867. The third book in the loose trilogy was “The End of the Hunt,” published in 1994, which brought the tale into the early 20th Century.
Mr. Flanagan was born in 1923 in Greenwich, Conn. His father was a dentist and his mother a homemaker. All four of his grandparents had come to the U.S. from County Fermanagh.
He dominated the high school newspaper in Greenwich along with his friend Truman Capote.
Mr. Flanagan once described his affection for Ireland this way: “It is not the romantic, rather sentimental Ireland of many Irish-Americans that I love, but the actual Ireland, a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark.”
