Julian Moynahan

Career In 1954, Moynahan was an instructor in English at Amherst College. In 1959, he was appointed for three years to a Bicentennial Preceptorship at Princeton University. He went on to become a lecturer at Princeton, Harvard, and University College Dublin, and by 1969 was professor of English literature at Rutgers University.

In 1966, Moynahan was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. and was a published poet.

Much of Moynahan's academic work was focussed on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. His views on Lawrence were mixed, and he found The Plumed Serpent to be "the most padded and redundant" of his works. In 1975, Joseph Frank invited Moynahan to give three lectures at Princeton on Anglo-Irish writers, and from this a third specialism developed. He struck up friendships with Seán Ó Faoláin and Benedict Kiely. Two weeks after Nabokov's funeral at Montreux, an American memorial event was held at the McGraw Hill auditorium in New York, and some 500 people heard Alfred Appel, Alfred Kazin, John Updike, Dmitri Nabokov, Moynahan, and Harold McGraw pay tribute.

Moynahan's most prolific period was the 1960s and 1970s. In this survey of the whole field of Anglo-Irish literature, there are chapters on Elizabeth Bowen, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Lever, Sheridan Le Fanu, C. R. Maturin, George Moore, Somerville and Ross, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett, and historical summaries. Moynahan finds that the women writers, Edgeworth, Somerville and Ross, and Bowen, were a major force in the development of literary imagination. For him, The Real Charlotte is a contender for the title of best Irish novel before Joyce.

By 2005, Moynahan had retired and was a professor emeritus at Rutgers. After he died of pneumonia in March 2014, on his 89th birthday,

Awards Ingram Merrill Foundation Award National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, 1966 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983