Tom O’Shea, a 20th Century Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Story

Tom O'Shea may have started out life as an orphan with no prospects, but in his final days he looked back on a life of love, family, and personal achievement that any man would be proud to call his own. A moving memoir of a daughter discovering her beloved father's story, Tom O'Shea: A 20th Century Man, commemorates a life well lived, and it sheds light on one Irish Catholic family's experience of American life during the mid-twentieth century.

After her father's death in 2001, Marian O'Shea Wernicke began to realize that much of his early life was a mystery. Through conversations with her mother and research of the time, she pieced together what his early years had been like and soon recognized she wasn't just crafting a family history. Suddenly the life of Tom O'Shea was expanding, and as all good stories are, her father's was a universally poignant tale that speaks beyond the confines of one man or one family.

Experience life as an orphan, an Irish-American, and a US Marine in the Pacific during WWII through this intriguing story of a man who, though abandoned as a child, ended his days a happy husband, father, and grandfather.

Marian O’Shea Wernicke is a retired professor who was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. The oldest of seven children, she entered the convent of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood at age sixteen, serving at their mission in Lima, Peru, for three years before choosing to leave religious life. While pursuing a career in teaching, she met and married her husband, Michael, and the two of them spent a year living in Spain, where she taught for St. Louis University in Madrid. She later went on to become a professor of English and creative writing at Pensacola State College.

Wernicke has edited a collection of short stories and memoirs, Confessions: Fact or Fiction?, with her colleague Herta Feely. Her most recent published work, Tom O’Shea: A 20th Century Man, is a personal memoir about her father.