In an international career of nearly half a century St. John Ervine achieved critical and popular success and played a considerable role in the world of the theater, both as playwright and dramatic critic. His early plays were seen as part of the Irish dramatic renaissance and highly praised; three of his interwar plays, The First Mrs. Fraser, Anthony and Anna, and Robert's Wife, had London runs of two years.

John St. John Greer Ervine, dramatist, critic, novelist, and biographer, was born in Ballymacarrett, a shipyard suburb of Belfast. He was the son of William and Sarah Jane Park Greer Ervine, both of whom were deaf mutes. Ervine sprang from a long-established Ulster Protestant family--for at least 300 years, he later wrote, his forefathers on both sides of the family had been born, and bred, and buried in County Down, with the exception of one emigrant who died in...