Edwin O'Connor

Edwin O'Connor was born in Rhode Island and educated at La Salle Academy and the University of Notre Dame. He began working as a freelance writer for magazines such as The Atlantic after returning home from the war in 1946. He is best remembered for his novels about the Irish-Americans of New England, including The Last Hurrah (1956) and The Edge of Sadness (1961), the latter of which won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In addition to his celebrated fiction and short stories, he invented the phrase "the last hurrah."