[4] In 1946 he began working as a freelance author, selling his stories and reports to numerous magazines, including Atlantic Monthly.
During the 1950s O'Connor began a career as a television critic for two Boston newspapers, a profession he would follow for the remainder of his life.
The novel concerns a Boston Irish politician, Frank Skeffington, as related by a nephew whom he invites to accompany him on what is an eventually unsuccessful reelection campaign.
While it is not a roman à clef, there is some similarity between the novel's Skeffington and the real life Boston Mayor James Michael Curley.
However, as Charles Fanning notes, "The windfall profits from The Last Hurrah made O'Connor for the first time financially secure.
"Edwin O'Connor, the author of The Last Hurrah, summed up the era in his final novel, All in the Family: 'Corruption here had a shoddy, penny-ante quality it did not have in other states....Here everything was up for grabs and nothing was too small to steal....In our politics there seemed to be a depthless cushion of street-corner cynicism, a special kind of tainted, small-time fellowship which sent out a complex of vines and shoots so interconnected that even the sleaziest poolroom bookie managed, in some way, however obscure, to be in touch with the mayor's office or the governor's chair.