Oliver St. John Gogarty

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Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty (August 17, 1878 - September 22, 1957) was an Irish physician and ear surgeon, who was also a poet and writer, one of the most prominent Dublin wits, and for some time a political figure of the Irish Free State. He is perhaps now best known as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

Born at 5 Rutland (now Parnell) Square in Dublin, Gogarty was a medical student and joker who wrote humorous verse and stories. His verse was admired by W. B. Yeats who included more poems by Gogarty than any other poet in his Oxford Book of English Verse. He had a strained relationship with Joyce that ended when Joyce left Ireland; Gogarty claimed a gun was involved. One of his best known bits of doggerel, The Ballad of Japing Jesus, was quoted in the first chapter of Ulysses as the Ballad of Joking Jesus.

In 1924, Gogarty won the bronze medal at the Olympic Games for his poem Ode to the Tailteann Games.

Gogarty's 1937 memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville Street resulted in a libel lawsuit. Henry Sinclair, an uncle of Samuel Beckett's, claimed that Gogarty characterized his grandfather, Morris Harris, as a usurer. The trial received a fair amount of public attention at the time, and the as-yet-unknown Beckett filed one of two affidavits on behalf of his uncle's lawsuit and played a key role in the trial proper, which Gogarty ultimately lost.

In later life, he moved widely in British society, and the USA. He died in New York City.