Louis D'Alton was one of the leading Irish playwrights of the late 1930s and the 1940s, a period when Ireland, due to its wartime neutrality, was isolated as at no other time from the rest of the world. As a result, he is regarded today as a regional author in the true sense of the word, almost exclusively concerned with Ireland and her specific problems and untouched by wider issues or by modernist tendencies from abroad.

Born in Dublin, Louis Lynch D'Alton was the son of Charles D'Alton, a provincial Irish actor-manager. In his youth, like the young Eugene O'Neill, he experienced the squalor and rootlessness of a provincial touring company, traveling in England and Scotland as well as on the Irish circuit. He later utilized some of these experiences in his second novel, Rags and Sticks (1938). In 1916, he temporarily joined the Irish civil service but left it...