All Will Be Well is John McGahern's account of his life, from a grim childhood to the start of his career as a novelist with the publication of The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965), books that established him as one of Ireland's most impressive writers. He was born on November 12, 1934 in Dublin, the eldest child of a family that eventually came to seven children. He spent his early years in Ballinamore, County Leitrim. His mother was a teacher, employed when her health permitted in Aughawillian and other small, remote schools in Leitrim. She was an ardent believer in the Catholic faith that surrounded her. As McGahern recalls in All Will Be Well:

His mother's most intense hope for her son was that he would become a priest and that she would live to attend his first Mass. She died of cancer in 1945. McGahern's father, like my own, was a police sergeant. McGahern's was one of the first generation of policemen (the Garda Síochána) established by the Irish Free State in 1922.