Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O'Neill was an Irish writer and civil servant who died in 1952. Born in Tuam, County Galway, he worked as a school inspector and later as Secretary of the Department of Education in the Irish Free State, writing fiction alongside a career in public administration. He is best remembered for Land Under England (1935), a science-fiction account of a lost underground civilization ruled by telepathic mind control, widely read as an anti-fascist allegory and later reprinted in genre surveys such as Fantasy: The 100 Best Books and the SF Masterworks series. He also wrote Wind from the North (1934), a time-travel novel set around the Battle of Clontarf, and Day of Wrath (1936), a future-war narrative. He was married to the poet Mary Devenport O'Neill, a friend and correspondent of W. B. Yeats.