A short life of the author
Christy Brown (5 June 1932 – 7 September 1981) was an Irish writer and painter who was born with severe cerebral palsy and who learned to write and paint using his left foot — the only limb over which he had voluntary control. His autobiography My Left Foot (1954) and his novel Down All the Days (1970) are achievements that would be remarkable under any circumstances and are astonishing given the physical conditions of their creation. Brown wrote with an exuberance, a sensory richness, and an unsentimental toughness that refused pity and demanded recognition on literary terms.
Life
Brown was born in the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, the tenth of twenty-two children (thirteen survived) in a working-class family in Kimmage. His father was a bricklayer. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which left him unable to speak clearly or control his body — with the exception of his left foot. For years, his family assumed he was intellectually disabled.
The breakthrough came when he was five: he seized a piece of chalk with his left foot and wrote the letter “A” on the floor. His mother, Bridget, recognised that his mind was intact and devoted herself to his education. A local social worker, Dr. Robert Collis, eventually arranged for Brown to receive physical therapy and educational support. Brown taught himself to type with the toes of his left foot.
He wrote My Left Foot at twenty-two. The book’s success brought him literary recognition and financial support. He continued writing — novels, poetry, and essays — and was a familiar figure in Dublin’s literary pubs, where he was known for his sharp wit, his prodigious drinking, and his refusal to be patronised. He married Mary Carr in 1972.
Brown died in 1981, apparently choking during a meal. He was forty-nine.
My Left Foot (1954)
Brown’s autobiography tells the story of his childhood and youth in working-class Dublin — the large, chaotic, affectionate family, the brutal poverty, the gradual discovery of his intelligence, and his painstaking mastery of writing and painting with his foot. The book is remarkable for its refusal to sentimentalise. Brown writes about his disability with directness and sometimes anger, but the book’s dominant tone is one of fierce vitality — the pleasure of language, the warmth of family, the stubborn joy of being alive against the odds.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in the 1989 film — for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor — brought Brown’s story to a worldwide audience. Day-Lewis’s extraordinary physical commitment to the role (he remained in a wheelchair between takes and was reportedly fed by crew members) became the standard against which subsequent method performances were measured. Brenda Fricker won Best Supporting Actress as Bridget Brown.
Down All the Days (1970)
Brown’s finest literary achievement is not his autobiography but his novel, which reimagines his childhood in a lyrical, Joycean prose that stunned critics. The novel is a fictionalized account of growing up disabled in a large Dublin family — the father’s drinking, the mother’s endurance, the children’s wild energy, the streets and pubs and tenements of working-class Dublin. The prose is dense, musical, and deliberately excessive — Brown wrote with the same defiant abundance with which he lived, as though compensating through language for everything his body could not do.
The novel was a critical and commercial success. Critics compared Brown to James Joyce and Sean O’Casey — comparisons that, while generous, were not absurd. Brown’s ear for Dublin speech and his ability to render the chaos of family life with both tenderness and savagery are genuinely impressive.
Poetry and Later Work
Brown published several volumes of poetry and two more novels — A Shadow on Summer (1974) and Wild Grow the Lilies (1976). The poetry is uneven but occasionally powerful. The later novels did not match the quality of Down All the Days.
Collecting Brown
My Left Foot (1954, Secker & Warburg) in first edition brings $100–$400. Down All the Days (1970, Secker & Warburg) brings $50–$200. Signed copies are rare and unusual — Brown’s signature, made with his foot, is highly distinctive.