Patrick Collumb was born in Ireland's County Longford on December 8, 1881; respect for his heritage prompted him to adopt the Gaelic spelling of his name—Padraic Colum—at the age of seventeen.

Colum belonged to a group of writers who contributed to a movement known as the Irish Literary Renaissance around the turn of the century. These writers were inspired by Irish myth and folkways and produced a wealth of

Colum was often overshadowed by the more famous writers of the movement: poet William Butler Yeats, dramatists Sean O'Casey, John Millington Synge, and Lady Gregory, and author James Joyce, most of whom were his friends and supporters. Over the years Colum gradually built a substantial and wide-ranging literary legacy of his own, consisting of poems, plays, short stories, and retellings of myths. He was an active participant in the development of...