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After a Navy hitch in World War II, he moved to Ireland, studied at Trinity College, married a Yorkshire girl named Valerie and had two children (Philip, now 17, and Karen, 13). Brooklyn boy or not, he is more comfortable taking tea at Fortnum & Mason's elegant top-floor restaurant in London than he would be at Nathan's hot-dog emporium in Coney Island.
Donleavy wrote The Ginger Man in 1951, but it was four years before he could find a publisher, Maurice Girodias of Paris' Olympia Press. Only too late did Donleavy discover that Girodias planned to make Ginger Man part of his notoriously pornographic Traveler's Companion Series (Until She Screams, Houses of Joy). Furious, Donleavy initiated a lawsuit against the publisher (it is still pending); he was convinced that his career was ruined forever. As it turned out, Ginger Man was a critical and popular hit, which established Donleavy's reputation as the forerunner of the Black Humorists. He doesn't like that classification at all, but then it beats the pornographer label.
He has since written two other novels (A Singular Man and The Saddest Summer of Samuel S), done play adaptations of those books, and a collection of short stories, Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule. His next novel, set in Western Ireland, will be called The Onion Enters, and Donleavy guarantees that it will be more scandalous than Balthazar B.
Nonskid. His literary struggles and success seem to have changed him. Money has removed him from the poor Irish farmhouse where the cows ate the cabbages. Now, at 42, he has six residences—three in London, the rest in the Isle of Man, Zurich and Manhattan —and carries currency of several nations to protect his "nonskid agility." He has also become more remote. "There was once a time," he has written, "when I could never get enough of drink and talk, but now I prefer the cocktail party which is utterly proper, where voices, incomes and laughter are carefully measured."
And when he is not bringing lawsuits against publishers, dictating to two secretaries or walking—mainly in cemeteries—he reads movie magazines, which in some perverse way he finds "so forthright, always telling the truth honestly. Some of the best writing is in movie magazines." As for his own writing, Donleavy prefers not to discuss it except to suggest that he is very practical-minded about his craft. "One day," he says, "while innocently looking in the window of an old established cheese shop in London, the definition of what writing is all about hit me. Writing is turning one's worst moments into money."