J.P. Donleavy | 'Ginger Man' author, 91

J.P. Donleavy, 91, an Irish American novelist whose 1955 debut,

The Ginger Man

, was rejected by 45 publishers for its scabrous, sexually explicit content but eventually sold more than 45 million copies and came to be regarded as a modern classic, died Sept. 11 at a hospital near his home in Ireland. A sister, Mary Rita Donleavy, told the New York Times he died after a stroke.

Mr. Donleavy was a New York native who moved to Ireland for college, adopted an outfit of corduroy and tweed (along with a matching brogue) and established himself as an itinerant successor to James Joyce. He wrote more than a dozen novels and story collections, many of them set in Dublin, and was sometimes described as one of the funniest and finest writers in the English language.

"No contemporary writer is better than J.P. Donleavy at his best," the New Yorker wrote in a review of "Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule," a 1964 collection. with an alliterative title that became a feature in books like "The Saddest Summer of Samuel S" (1966), "The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B" (1968), and "The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman" (1977).

Yet Mr. Donleavy's literary reputation rested almost entirely on his first novel. The Ginger Man was a semiautobiographical account of red-bearded Sebastian Dangerfield, an impoverished American World War II vet who studies at Trinity College, exposes himself on the trolley, and strays far from his wife, Marion. The novel's bawdy descriptions nearly prevented it from being published.

Mr. Donleavy's first marriage, to Valerie Heron, ended in divorce in 1969. He married Mary Wilson Price, an actress, the following year, and they divorced in 1989. Survivors include four children. - Washington Post