Welcome to the Ireland of its Writers

Walk the streets of Dublin with Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Roddy Doyle. Contemplate the wild glens of Wicklow with John Millington Synge and Seamus Heaney. Wander the thrilling Cliffs of Moher with Wallace Stevens. Visit antic Limerick with Frank McCourt; mysterious Coole Park with Lady Gregory; breathtaking Sligo with William Butler Yeats; wild Donegal with Brien Friel; and hidden Clare with Edna O''Brien.

No place has inspired more great literature than Ireland, which in each new generation gives birth to an astonishing number of poets, storytellers, and dramatists. For the literary pilgrim to arrive, book in hand, at the pub where Joyce set a scene or the mountain where Yeats imagined a myth is to uncover fresh meaning in the works of writers in love with their native landscape.

In For the Love of Ireland, Susan Cahill offers the jewels of Irish literature. Each selection is followed by traveler''s advice on how to find and fully experience the place that''s about. Whether you take this book with you to Ireland or savor it in your armchair, you will be enriched, ennobled, and entertained by writers of remarkable range and at the top of their form.

Welcome to the Ireland of its Writers
Walk the streets of Dublin with Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Roddy Doyle. Contemplate the wild glens of Wicklow with John Millington Synge and Seamus Heaney. Wander the thrilling Cliffs of Moher with Wallace Stevens. Visit antic Limerick with Frank McCourt; mysterious Coole Park with Lady Gregory; breathtaking Sligo with William Butler Yeats; wild Donegal with Brien Friel; and hidden Clare with Edna O''Brien.
No place has inspired more great literature than Ireland, which in each new generation gives birth to an astonishing number of poets, storytellers, and dramatists. For the literary pilgrim to arrive, book in hand, at the pub where Joyce set a scene or the mountain where Yeats imagined a myth is to uncover fresh meaning in the works of writers in love with their native landscape.
In For the Love of Ireland, Susan Cahill offers the jewels of Irish literature. Each selection is followed by traveler''s advice on how to find and fully experience the place that''s about. Whether you take this book with you to Ireland or savor it in your armchair, you will be enriched, ennobled, and entertained by writers of remarkable range and at the top of their form.

Apparently doomed to an obscure Anglican parsonage in Laracor, Ireland, even after he had written his anonymous masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (c.1696), Swift turned a political mission to England from the Irish Protestant clergy into an avenue to prominence as the chief propagandist for the Tory government. His exhilaration at achieving importance in his forties appears engagingly in his Journal to Stella (1710--13), addressed to Esther Johnson, a young protegee for whom Swift felt more warmth than for anyone else in his long life. At the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories in 1714, Swift became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In Ireland, which he considered exile from a life of power and intellectual activity in London, Swift found time to defend his oppressed compatriots, sometimes in such contraband essays as his Drapier's Letters (1724), and sometimes in such short mordant pieces as the famous A Modest Proposal (1729); and there he wrote perhaps the greatest work of his time, Gulliver's Travels (1726). Using his characteristic device of the persona (a developed and sometimes satirized narrator, such as the anonymous hack writer of A Tale of a Tub or Isaac Bickerstaff in Predictions for the Ensuing Year, who exposes an astrologer), Swift created the hero Gulliver, who in the first instance stands for the bluff, decent, average Englishman and in the second, humanity in general. Gulliver is a full and powerful vision of a human being in a world in which violent passions, intellectual pride, and external chaos can degrade him or her---to animalism, in Swift's most horrifying images---but in which humans do have scope to act, guided by the Classical-Christian tradition. Gulliver's Travels has been an immensely successful children's book (although Swift did not care much for children), so widely popular through the world for its imagination, wit, fun, freshness, vigor, and narrative skill that its hero is in many languages a common proper noun. Perhaps as a consequence, its meaning has been the subject of continuing dispute, and its author has been called everything from sentimental to mad. Swift died in Dublin and was buried next to his beloved "Stella."

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was born on April 13, 1906 near Dublin, Ireland into a middle-class Protestant family. As a boy, he studied French and enjoyed cricket, tennis, and boxing. At Trinity College he continued his studies in French and Italian and became interested in theater and film, including American film. After graduation, Beckett taught English in Paris and traveled through France and Germany. While in Paris Beckett met Suzanne Deschevaus-Dusmesnil. During World War II when Paris was invaded, they joined the Resistance. They were later forced to flee Paris after being betrayed to the Gestapo, but returned in 1945. Beckett and Deschevaus-Dusmesnil married in 1961. Samuel Beckett's first novel was Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Among his many works are Murphy; Malone Dies; and The Unnameable. His plays include Endgame, Happy Days, Not I, That Time, and Krapp's Last Tape. In 1953, the production of Waiting For Godot in Paris by director and actor Roger Blin earned Beckett international fame. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. His style was postmodern minimalist and some of his major themes were imprisonment in one's self, the failure of language, and moral conduct in a godless world. Despite his fame, Samuel Beckett led a secluded life. In his later years he suffered from cataracts and emphysema. His wife Suzanne died on July 17, 1989 and Beckett died on December 22nd of the same year.

Roddy Doyle is the author of five previous novels, including a Booker Prize nominee, The Van, and a Booker Prize winning international bestseller Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. He has also written several screenplays, most recently When Brendan Met Trudy. His first children's book, The Giggler Treatment, will be published in September by Scholastic. He lives in Dublin.

Seamus Heaney, the eldest of nine children of Margaret and Patrick Heaney, was born on April 13, 1939, at the family farm in Mossbawn, Ireland. Heaney received a degree in English from Queen's College in Belfast in 1961. After earning his teacher's certificate in English from St. Joseph's College in Belfast the following year, Heaney took a position at the school as an English teacher. During his time as a teacher at St. Joseph's, Heaney wrote and published work in the university magazine under the pen name Incertus. In August of 1965, Heaney married Marie Devlin, and the following year he became an English literature lecturer at Queen's College in Belfast. After the birth of his first son Michael in 1966, Heaney wrote and published a volume of poems entitled Death of a Naturalist. The volume went on to receive the E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Heaney's second son Christopher was born in 1968, and his only daughter Catherine Ann arrived in 1973. After the death of his parents, Heaney published the poetry volumes The Haw Lantern, which includes a sonnet sequence memorializing his mother, and Seeing Things, a collection containing numerous poems for his father. Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Swedish Academy of Letters described as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Frank McCourt, 1930- Frank McCourt was born in 1930's Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents, Malachy and Angela. At the age of four, McCourt and his family moved back to Ireland and settled in Limerick. Shortly thereafter, McCourt's father abandoned the family to a life of poverty and struggle that shaped young Frank's life and future profession as a writer of his own memoirs, the critically acclaimed Angela's Ashes. McCourt attended school until the age of 14, at which point he was forced to drop out to help support the family. In 1949, he scraped together enough money to afford passage back to America. Once there, he worked odd jobs until his decision to go back to school and persuaded New York University to allow him acceptance among the ranks of the collegiate. McCourt began to teach in 1970 at Seward Park High School in Manhatten's Lower East Side. His students led lives similar to his own meager beginnings and in an effort to connect with them, he told them stories of his own impoverished childhood. Hoping to stimulate his income, McCourt occasionally wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, all the while continuing to write down his memoirs. In 1972, McCourt began teaching at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan where his students constantly delighted him and urged him to pursue his own writings, even as he urged them in their prospective talents. In 1994 McCourt retired from teaching to finally take the time to write the story of his life. After so many years of taking notes and writing down anecdotes, McCourt had compiled an impressive history. This history became the critically acclaimed Angela's Ashes, which hit bookstores in 1996 and went on to become a Pulitzer prize winning story in 1997. McCourt also wrote 'Tis, a book almost as well known as Angela' Ashes. He always told his students to write what they know and write it from the heart. In taking his own advice, he earned the highest honors possible for an author to achieve.