Christy Brown
Written off as mentally disabled at birth, he wrote and painted with the only limb he could control
Christy Brown was born in Dublin in 1932, one of twenty-two children of a bricklayer, thirteen of whom survived. He had cerebral palsy so severe that he could not speak intelligibly or control his arms, and doctors advised his mother, Bridget, to put him in an institution. She refused, and insisted on treating him like the rest of her children, carrying him about the house and talking to him constantly.
When he was five, sitting on the floor while his sister did her lessons, he grabbed a piece of chalk with his left foot, the one part of his body he could control, and after a long struggle scratched the letter A on the floor. His mother knelt beside him and understood that his mind was whole. From then on she taught him to read and write with his foot, and his brothers pushed him around the streets of Crumlin in a boxcar.
He painted, then wrote, typing with his toes. A Dublin doctor, Robert Collis, arranged treatment and helped him shape his story into My Left Foot, published in 1954 when he was 22. It sold widely, but he was frustrated by its sentimental tone, and spent the next fifteen years on the novel that became Down All the Days, a raw, funny, sprawling picture of a Dublin slum, published in 1970 and translated into fourteen languages.
He married Mary Carr in 1972 and moved to Somerset, where he died in 1981, aged 49. The 1989 film of his life won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar.