McCrea, Barry

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Trinity College, B.A., 1997; Princeton University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8299. E-mail—barry.mccrea@yale.edu.

CAREER: Yale University, New Haven, CT, assistant professor of comparative literature.

WRITINGS:

The First Verse (novel), Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Modernism's Family Values.

SIDELIGHTS: Barry McCrea's novel The First Verse tells the story of Niall Lenihan, a freshman at Trinity College, Dublin, who is recovering from a failed affair with a male lover. Instead of socializing with his classmates, Niall finds refuge in a gay pub, where he meets a group of friends who have formed a secret society, or cult, and who live their lives based on their interpretations of literary texts, poems, and other written materials. McCrea told Vanessa Lawrence in an interview for Women's Wear Daily that "when you start to read seriously, one of the first things that happens to you is you get overenthusiastic. You start to think that literature has all the answers, that if you read enough, eventually you'll come across the answer. And the truth is very different. In fact, you have to make the answers up yourself." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel "rich in ideas and true to the real world." Library Journal reviewer Whitney Scott wrote that "McCrea's gay Gen X opus delivers sharp pacing and a sense of place."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2005, Whitney Scott, review of The First Verse, p. 1753.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2005, review of The First Verse, p. 443.

Women's Wear Daily, June 16, 2005, Vanessa Lawrence, interview with McCrea, p. 4.

ONLINE

Yale University Department of Comparative Literature Web site, http://www.yale.edu/complit/ (October 15, 2005), profile of McCrea.