Who is finley peter dunne

He is noted for his humorous sketches in which an Irish saloonkeeper named Mr. Dooley commented on current events. Peter Dunne was born July 10, , in Chicago, the fifth of seven children of an orthodox Catholic immigrant couple from Ireland. Peter at 19 he added Finley to his name graduated from high school in He covered sports and police courts for several newspapers, then became city editor of the Chicago Times when he was Responsible positions on other papers followed.

On the staff of the Evening Post in , he met Mary Ives Abbott, a cultivated book reviewer for the Post, who recognized Dunne's promise and began to guide him. She introduced him to Chicago's select society. In Dunne published his first sketch in Irish dialect in the Post.

Volume 3. Context Dates. Life: - Activity: - United States Birth; Primary Activity. Editor Primary Journalist Primary. Other Resources. Although young Peter was the only son deemed smart enough to attend high school, he graduated l… Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member student of staff of a subscribing institution see List , you should be able to access the LE on campus directly without the need to log in , and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address.

The Chicago Dooley pieces contain valuable chunks of social history and pioneering contributions to the development of literary realism in America. Dunne takes the late-nineteenth-century journalistic phenomenon of urban local color and extends it, through his feeling for place and community, to evoke Bridgeport as the most solidly realized ethnic neighborhood in nineteenth-century American literature. He takes the realist's faith in the common man as literary subject and creates sympathetic, dignified, even heroic characters, plausibly placed in a working-class immigrant neighborhood.

And finally, place, community, and character are all embodied in the vernacular voice of a sixty-year-old, smiling public-house man, the first such dialect voice to transcend the stereotypes of "stage-Irish" ethnic humor. Throughout the s, Mr. Dooley gave Chicagoans a weekly example of the potential for serious fiction of common speech and everyday life. In his way, Dunne was as much a trailblazer into the American city as a setting for literature as Theodore Dreiser or Stephen Crane.

Actually, he adds a dimension lacking in the work of both of these better known writers. Dooley is relatively comfortable in Bridgeport. He proves that the city can be a home. Dunne's career took a sharp turn in , when Mr. Dooley's satirical coverage of the Spanish-American War brought him to the attention of readers outside Chicago. Dooley's reports of military and political bungling during the "splendid little war" were widely reprinted, and national syndication soon followed.

By the time Dunne moved to New York in , Mr. Dooley was the most popular figure in American journalism. From this point until World War I, Dunne's gadfly mind ranged over the spectrum of newsworthy events and characters, both national and international: from Teddy Roosevelt's health fads to Andrew Carnegie's passion for libraries; from the invariable silliness of politics to society doings at Newport; from the Boer and Boxer Rebellions abroad to the so-called Negro, Indian, and immigration problems in the United States.