Oliver St. John Gogarty, (born Aug. 17, 1878, Dublin, Ire.—died Sept. 22, 1957, New York, N.Y., U.S.), writer, wit, and raconteur associated with the Irish literary renaissance whose memoirs vividly re-create the Dublin of his youth.
Gogarty attended Royal University (now University College, Dublin), where he was a fellow student of James Joyce. (He later appeared in Joyce’s Ulysses as the character Buck Mulligan, an identification that he heartily disliked and that proved to be a lifelong irritant to him. He did not take Joyce seriously as an artist.) Gogarty practiced as a surgeon and throat specialist in Dublin, where he became acquainted with W.B. Yeats, George Moore, George Russell (AE), and other leaders of the renaissance. Gogarty wrote the entertaining memoirs As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937), Tumbling in the Hay (1939), and It Isn’t This Time of Year at All (1954).