In the foreword to a collection of his stories published in 1970, O'Faolain acknowledged that his early work was heavily poetical, "full of romantic words, such as dawn, dew, onwards, youth, world, adamant, and dusk"; full, too, of "those most romantic of all words, and and but, words that are part of the attempt to carry on and expand the effect after the sense has been given." His first problem was to find or imagine events splendid enough to appease his style, a style compounded not only of poems learned by heart but of a desire to find the heroic note fulfilled in daily practice. He had the words he loved but not always the occasions to justify them. So he imagined an Ireland continuous with the aftermath of 1916, a country of young men and the glory they longed for…. (p. 11)

[In] "Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories" (1932) and...