Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany, was born in London on 24 July 1878. He was of an ancient Irish family and succeeded to the family title, as the eighteenth Baron Dunsany, in 1899. He was given a top-flight English education at Cheam School, Surrey, Eton College, and the military academy at Sandhurst, and he went into a fashionable and famous regiment, the Coldstream Guards, his grandfather's regiment. He served as a junior officer in Gibraltar and then in the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. In World War I he was a captain in the Fifth Inniskilling Fusiliers, serving with distinction in France, and he received some slight wounds while serving in minor actions against Irish insurrectionists in 1916.

After World War I Dunsany took up literature as a sort of sideline and was a prolific writer of drama (with encouragement from William Butler Yeats and others), short stories, poetry (he deplored...