The Story of Chicago May

Nuala O'Faolain

Mar 2008 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Terry Donnelly

About this audiobook

Award-winning memoirist and New York Times best-selling author Nuala O'Faolain branches into new territory with her biography of the infamous Irish-American prostitute and thief, Chicago May. O'Faolain uses May's autobiography, primary sources from the turn of the 19th century and her own experience as an Irishwoman to bring May-and all her heartache, deception and violence-to life. "The biographer makes herself a complement rather than an intrusion, and May emerges lively, unique and cut from the cloth of Irish and American reinvention." -Publishers Weekly

About the author

Journalist and author Nuala O'Faolain was born in 1940 and grew up in the countryside near Dublin. Before earning a postgraduate degree in English from Oxford University, she studied English as University College, Dublin and medieval English literature at the University of Hull. She had numerous jobs including a lecturer in the English department at University College; produced programs for Open Door, a community-access documentary department at the BBC; and produced current-affairs television programs for Radio Telifis Eirann. She started writing a weekly opinion column for The Irish Times in 1986. She wrote two memoirs, Are You Somebody? (1996) and Almost There (2003), and two novels, My Dream of You (2001) and The Story of Chicago May (2006). She died of lung cancer on May 9, 2008.