One teacher, Daniel Corkery, introduced O'Connor's class to the Irish language and poetry and deeply influenced the young pupil.

His childhood was strongly shaped by his mother, who supplied much of the family's income by cleaning houses, and his father was unable to keep steady employment due to alcoholism.

He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and joined the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War, working in a small propaganda unit in Cork City.

In February 1923, O'Connor was imprisoned in Cork City Gaol and in April moved to Gormanston, County Meath where he was held until just before Christmas.

[7] Through Phibbs, he met and was befriended by George William Russell (Æ), who requested O'Connor to send him material for publication.

[10] In 1950, he accepted invitations to teach in the United States, where many of his short stories had been published in The New Yorker and won great acclaim.

[15] O'Connor was perhaps best known for his varied and comprehensive short stories but also for his work as a literary critic, essayist, travel writer, translator and biographer.

From the early 1930s following the publication of his first volume of short stories, Guests of the Nation (1931), to his death in 1966 he was a prolific writer of short stories (c. 160), translations of a wide range of Irish poetry (c. 120), plays, both alone and in collaborations (c.10), novels (2) as well as works in non-fiction covering topics in literary criticism and theory, travel, Irish culture, and biography.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy remarked anecdotally from An Only Child at the conclusion of his speech at the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center in San Antonio on 21 November 1963: "Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall—and then they had no choice but to follow them.

"[18][19] O'Connor continued his autobiography through his time with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which ended in 1939, in his book, My Father's Son, which was published in 1968, posthumously.

It contains valuable character sketches of many of the leading Irish literary figures of the 1930s, in particular, Yeats and Russell (who wrote with the pseudonyms Æ and Æon).

The longest-established annual festival dedicated to the short story form in an English-speaking country, it regularly hosts readings, workshops and masterclasses for contemporary practitioners of the form, as well as celebrating the work of O'Connor and other local short fiction writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Seán Ó Faoláin and William Trevor.

[21] The festival has hosted readings by: Richard Ford, Julia O'Faolain, James Lasdun, Alasdair Gray, Dan Rhodes, Eugene McCabe, Bernard MacLaverty, Desmond Hogan, James Plunkett, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Rebecca Miller, Anne Enright, Mike McCormack, Etgar Keret, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Cónal Creedon, Samrat Upadhyay, Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Rachel Sherman, David Marcus, Panos Karnezis, Nisha da Cunha, William Wall, Bret Anthony Johnston, David Means, Claire Keegan, Miranda July, Rick Moody, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Julie Orringer, ZZ Packer, Simon Van Booy, Wells Tower, Charlotte Grimshaw and Kevin Barry among others.