Liam O'Flaherty was born to Michael and Margaret Ganly O'Flaherty in the village of Gort na gCapall, Inishmore, the Aran Islands. The effects of extreme poverty, of the struggle against the elements, of isolation, and of an island mentality--that of the outsider--were ever apparent in his life and in his fiction. In order to get an education, O'Flaherty entered seminary. He studied first at Rockwell College of the Holy Ghost Fathers and in 1913 attended Blackrock College, where he organized a corps of Republican Volunteers among the schoolboys. He returned to seminary--this time Dublin Diocesan Seminary in Clonliffe--but left after a short while and attended University College, Dublin, for a few months before enlisting in the Irish Guards unit of the British Army. In September 1917, he was wounded by a shell explosion and, not completely recovered, was discharged in 1918.

For the next four years, O'Flaherty traveled extensively, almost compulsively--to...