Tom O'Flaherty (Tomás Ó Flaithearta, 1889-1936) was born and grew up on the Aran Island of Inis Mór, and emigrated to America in 1912. He was the older brother of writer Liam O'Flaherty (1896-1984). He spent twenty-one years in America, working as a journalist, and editor, and an organizer in Labor and Communist organizations. He was involved in the American edition of the Irish Worker and founding editor of the Voice of Labor. He was on the editorial staff of the weekly Worker and later Daily Worker and also contributed articles to Political Affairs and the Labor Defender.He visited Russia twice and was a founding member of the Communist League of America. In 1934 he returned to Ireland and published two collections of stories, Aranmen All (1934) and Cliffmen of the West(1936). He was one of the founding editors of An t-Éireannach, an Irish-language socialist newspaper.He died in 1936.

In his Irish-language writing, he is usually known as Tomás Ó Flaithearta, and some of his American writing is written under the name T. J. O'Flaherty.

For biographical essays, see Lawrence William White, "O'Flaherty, Thomas" in the Dictionary of Irish Biography(Cambridge, 2009), and Diarmuid Breathnach and Máire Ní Mhurchú, "Tomás Ó Flaithearta (1890-1936)" in Ainm.ie (www.ainm.ie). For an account of O'Flaherty's work with An t-Éireannach, see Éamon Ó Ciosáin, An t-Éireannach 1934-1937: Páipéar Sóisialach Gaeltachta (1993).