Literary career
On being discharged in 1946, FitzGibbon was offered, but refused, a job with the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Instead, he worked briefly as a schoolmaster at Saltus Grammar School in Bermuda from 1946 to 1947, before becoming a full-time independent writer. He lived in Italy for a time, where Norman Douglas "reluctantly agreed to cooperate with [him] on an authorized biography". He gave up on the biography, although in 1953 he wrote a short book about Douglas, and in 1974 he published an article entitled "Norman Douglas: Memoir of an Unwritten Biography". Douglas's first wife, Elsa FitzGibbon, was related to FitzGibbon on her father's side. Between 1950 and 1965, FitzGibbon lived in England.
FitzGibbon wrote prolifically, authoring over 30 books, including nine novels, historical works, memoirs, poetry, and biography. He made programmes for BBC radio, including documentaries about British fascism, the Blitz, and the 1930s hunger marches. He was a regular contributor to newspapers in the UK and Ireland, and for many years wrote for the magazine Encounter. His one stage venture, The Devil at Work (produced by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1971) met with little success.
He translated numerous works from German and French.
Among his translations were:
Sperber, Manès (1952). The Abyss. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. New York: Doubleday & Co.
Troyat, Henri (1952). The Mountain. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Sperber, Manès (1954). Journey Without End. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. New York: Doubleday & Co.
Rank, Claude (1959). Peter Neumann: The Black March - The Personal Story of an SS Man. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. New York: William Sloane Associates. ISBN 978-0-553-25360-3. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
Strogoff, Stephan (1961). The Russians. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. New York: Random House. OCLC 1389761.
One of his closest friends was Manès Sperber, many of whose books he translated from French, and whose views about the dangers of both left-wing and right-wing tyranny highly influenced Fitzgibbon.
Politically, FitzGibbon identified himself as a strong anti-Communist, after having been drawn to Communism as a young man. His credo, however, was that no political group that resorted to locking its opponents up in camps was any good. He refused to travel to Spain while Franco was alive. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he supported civil rights for Catholics but condemned the use of violence by all sides.
His 1960 novel When the Kissing Had to Stop caused controversy because of its explicit anti-CND theme; the book depicts the Soviet occupation of Britain after a left-wing government has removed its nuclear weapons. An ITV adaptation of When the Kissing Had to Stop caused even more controversy, and one writer called FitzGibbon a "fascist hyena". This amused him greatly, and he responded by publishing a collection of essays called Random Thoughts of a Fascist Hyena (1963).
FitzGibbon was a member of the Council of the Irish Academy of Letters, an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He later became an Irish citizen and lived in County Dublin.
