When Walter Macken died in 1967, Ireland lost one of her most respected and successful novelists and short-story writers, an author who enjoyed a wide reputation as a fiction writer not only at home but also in the United States and (through the translation of his works into numerous languages) in many other parts of the world. Macken, however, was not only a writer of fiction but also a successful dramatist and, throughout his life, a versatile man of the theater.

Born in the city of Galway, Walter Augustine Macken was the son of a carpenter who was killed in France in World War I. He was educated at the local Presentation Convent National School and the Patrician Brothers' Secondary School. Galway remained the center of his life; after limited sojourns in London, Dublin, and New York he always returned to the scene of his youth, and most of...