John Millington Synge: A Biography

Synge was born into an evangelical Protestant world that was increasingly at odds with the mainstream of Irish society. He himself became an agnostic and a Darwinian at an early age. Nonetheless he retained an interest in the occult and the mystical that was to stand him in good stead as a writer. Additionally, Synge was intensely musical. Indeed, his original intention was to make a career as a professional musician and he studied in Germany to that end.
In time, he abandoned music for literature, but his greatest plays sing with a unique musical language quite unlike the work of any other dramatist. He was a passionate man, one who watched everything, missed nothing, and assembled apparently insignificant details into building blocks of great art.
His three great plays, In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, and The Playboy of the Western World, established modern Irish drama and gave it its central position in the Irish literary revival. But the author of these remarkable works was a dying man. For years Synge had battled Hodgkin's disease and in 1909 he succumbed to it at the age of thirty-eight. This outstanding biography, written with great verve and assurance, will reestablish Synge in the hearts of a new generation.