Even seventy years after his death, Michael Collins remains a colossus of modern Irish history. During the five years before he died, Collins grew particularly close to Kitty Kiernan of Granard in County Longford. Harry Boland also expressed warm affection for Kitty in several letters, but it was the relationship between Michael and Kitty that developed and they planned to marry. They exhanged more than 300 letters which revealed not only their intimacy, but also the extraordinary pressure under which Collins lived during the tempstuous days of 1921 when the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty were being hammered out. A sequence of letters from London in May 1922 shows him near breaking point. Kitty's letters in turn tell of concern about the life of strain Michael is forced to live and its looming physical danger. Both of them wish for a normal life in marriage. This new and splendidly designed edition contains, for the first time, facsimile reproductions of the letters and includes correspondence first discovered in 1994.
It was published to coincide with the release of a major motion picture on Michael Collins, written and directed by Neil Jordan, starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts and based upon the relationship between Michael and Kitty. Other books by Leon O'Broin Michael Collins.
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Michael Collins flew in both the Gemini 10 and the Apollo 11 space missions in the 1960s. After retiring from NASA in 1970, he became director of the National Air and Space Museum until 1978, when he became undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He currently lives in South Florida.
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