Maurice Francis Egan

Maurice Francis Egan (May 24, 1852 – January 15, 1924) was an American writer and diplomat. He was a prolific writer and had a long and successful career as a Catholic journalist, literary critic, and novelist. He was a professor of English at two universities, and served as United States Minister in Copenhagen.

Life and career Egan's father was an immigrant from County Tipperary, Ireland who became a successful industrialist. His mother was from Philadelphia. Egan was born in Philadelphia in 1852. He received his secondary education from Brothers of the Christian Schools (FSC) at the newly opened LaSalle College. He did graduate work in journalism at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. He continued in this post under Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. He facilitated the purchase of the Danish West Indies (renamed the United States Virgin Islands) in 1917. This sale was the culmination of years of efforts on the part of Egan to get the Danes to sell these islands. He resigned his position because of ill-health, and left Copenhagen for the United States on 16 December 1917.

In 1908 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal, an award for an outstanding Catholic, in 1910.

His autobiography Recollections of a Happy Life was published in 1924.

He died in New York on January 15, 1924.

Awards and honors Laetare Medal, University of Notre Dame, 1910

Medal of Merit, Denmark, 1923

Works Egan published poetry in Ave Maria, Sacred Heart Messenger, The Century, and The Saturday Evening Post. He published twelve novels, including The Disappearance of John Longworthy (1890), The Success of Patrick Desmond (1893), and The Vocation of Edward Conway (1896). His most popular novel was The Wiles of Sexton Maginnis (1909), which was about a shaughraun, or vagabond, who never lies "except in the interest of truth". His novels were romantic and melodramatic, mixing some realism with the romantic conventions of 19th century literature. They depicted lives of contemporary urban Catholics in the United States, showing Irish Catholics learning how to practise their religion in the United States. His novels promoted genteel middle-class values. Egan was perhaps the first Irish American author to exchange the Irish part of their background for a genteel Catholic middle class identity. This was a common trade-off among his generation of Irish Americans.