Despite being declared by William Butler Yeats to be “Ireland’s Chekhov, “Since his death in 1966, a respectful forgetting has settled over Frank O’Connor,” observes Julian Barnes. In an analytic appreciation for The Observer, Barnes speculates that this is “because his finest work is in the short story, a medium more vulnerable over time. Perhaps because he doesn’t require academic explication; in which he resembles some of the writers he most revered — Maupassant, Chekhov, Turgenev.” Barnes goes on to analyze some of those stories, as well as O’Connor’s feelings about his art, such as those expressed in his The Lonely Voice (published by Melville House), “a study of the form that has since become a textbook in American writing schools.” He also considers O’Connor’s relationship with one of his main editors, the legendary William Maxwell of The New Yorker, and notes one of O’Connor’s most celebrated habits: rewriting, even after stories had been published. Says Barnes, “Maxwell, who knew writers well, said that ‘if there is an alarming object in this world it is a writer delighted with something he has just written. There is no worse sign.’ O’Connor almost never gave such a sign.”