British authorities transported O’Reilly to an Australian penal colony, from where he made a spectacular escape to the United States, an escapade retold by Kenneally in a manner befitting a thrilling Hollywood script. It was in the United States that O’Reilly’s brilliance flowered. As editor of Boston’s biggest selling Irish-American weekly newspaper, The Pilot, he became a powerful advocate of civil rights of minorities within society, be it the plight of his own immigrant countrymen or African-Americans. He retained a strong commitment to Ireland, working closely with Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, both renowned stalwarts in the Irish nationalist movement of the era. A complex and charismatic personality, O’Reilly’s popularity transcended race, religion and nationality.

After the formalities had ended, I spoke to the author and asked him the obvious question for any historical biographer, why focus on this person? “For many years I have been fascinated by O’Reilly’s life as a convict, his journalism and his support for civil rights,” enthused Kenneally, continuing,

“The more I discovered about his extraordinary life, the more determined I was to try and bring his story and his writing to a wider audience.”

O’Reilly was also an insightful and accomplished poet. Kenneally borrows the title of his biography from one of O’Reilly’s better-known works, a poem that is as relevant today as it was during the economic depressions that afflicted America in the decades after its Civil War. First published in an 1881 book of poems, “From the Earth, A Cry” conveys O’Reilly’s contempt for the exploitation of the working class by the wealthy. The poem imagines the planet calling on its oppressed classes to rise. If O'Reilly could see the consumerism, self-centeredness, greed, and violence that exist today in much of the world, he would see his words resonate once again with the downtrodden. He writes:

Insects and vermin, ye, the starving and dangerous myriads, 
List to the murmur that grows and growls! Come from your mines and mills, 
Pale-faced girls and women with ragged and hard-eyed children, 
Pour from your dens of toil and filth, out to the air of heaven— 
Breathe it deep, and hearken! A Cry from the cloud or beyond it, 
A Cry to the toilers to rise, to be high as the highest that rules them, 
To own the earth in their lifetime and hand it down to their children!