Christy Brown (5 June 1932 – 7 September 1981) was an Irish writer and painter whose cerebral palsy allowed him to write or type only with the toes of one foot.
During Brown's adolescence, a social worker began to visit regularly, bringing Christy books and painting materials, as he had shown a keen interest in the arts and literature.
[5] When My Left Foot became a literary sensation, one of the many people who wrote letters to Brown was married American woman Beth Moore.
Upon his return to Ireland, he was able to use proceeds from the sales of his books to design and move into a specially constructed home outside Dublin with his sister's family.
Further suspicions arose after Georgina Hambleton's biography, The Life That Inspired My Left Foot, revealed a supposedly more accurate and unhealthy version of their relationship.
Brown's magnum opus, Down All the Days was an ambitious project drawn largely from a playful expansion of My Left Foot; it also became an international best-seller, translated into 14 languages.
Like James Joyce, Brown employed the stream-of-consciousness technique and sought to document Dublin's culture through the use of humour, accurate dialects and intricate character description.
Down All the Days was followed by a series of other novels, including A Shadow on Summer (1972), Wild Grow the Lilies (1976) and A Promising Career (published posthumously in 1982).
The Anglo-Irish rock band The Pogues paid tribute to Christy Brown with a song titled "Down All the Days."