Billy Gogan, American

The Billy Gogan Story Cycle will encompass a four-volume fictional memoir told by an old Army general of his adventures as a young man in the prime of his youth-and in the prime of his adopted country's youth. The first volume, Billy Gogan: The Memoir of an American, opens the story with a young, recently orphaned Billy Gogan being forced to flee Ireland on the eve of the Great Hunger-either because he is the son of a dangerous revolutionary who died mysteriously or because his cousin, Seamus O'Creagh, does not trust him around his beautiful and headstrong daughter, Eibhlin. Billy and his traveling companions, a destitute Irish peasant woman named Máire and her daughter Fíona, endure the harsh passage to Gotham (New York), America's greatest city. They get separated upon landing and Máire and Fíona vanish in the throng. Billy is left to search for them in the dangerous streets of the Five Points, the greatest slum in America and 'ground zero" in the cultural collision of native Americans, Negroes fled from slavery in the south and Irish refugees from famine and persecution. Billy climbs the Irish mafia ladder until his future is taken in a cruel stroke of fate.