This book details the generation of authors who, under the guidance of editor Seán O'Faoláin, contributed to Ireland's premier literary journal of the mid-twentieth century, The Bell. It offers a new and enlightening view on the literary landscape of post-independence Ireland and places The Bell's contributors in their proper international context in an Atlantic world of letters between America, Ireland and the United Kingdom.

O'Faoláin and his co-editor Peadar O'Donnell drew around them a generation of diverse and talented writers in The Bell that flourished in the shadows of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. Rebel by vocation reveals the hidden stories behind the production of a literary journal and traces the petty disputes, rivalries and alliances that helped to create the most enduring 'little magazine' in post-independence Ireland. In doing so it comments upon O'Faoláin and the relationship of Irish artists to Church and State. Using new archival material from a range of sources this book explores how the editors of, and contributors to, The Bell reacted to the Ireland of their time and problematises received critical opinion on censorship, literary inheritance and Irish writing. Drawing comparisons with other literary movements in America and the United Kingdom, Rebel by vocation shows the early influences on O'Faoláin's writing during the first half of the twentieth century and the complexity of his thought on topics as varied as religion, censorship, the Irish novel and republicanism.

This work will be essential reading for students and lecturers interested in O'Faoláin and for readers in twentieth-century Irish literature and cultural history in general.