Mary and Paraic Colum
Lives and the Dream
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University College Dublin Press
Published:1st Sep '26
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Mary Colum was an influential reviewer and critic, feared for her rapier wit by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Her husband Padraic Colum was a successful author of children’s stories, a poet, playwright and essayist, and like Mary a political activist. But now, in the histories of Irish literature and of New York literary circles, Mary and Padraic Colum are unjustly forgotten.
Drawing from a wealth of previously unknown archival materials, this work provides a close-up study of a writing couple whose literary lives and legacy spanned decades and continents. It follows their journeys from rural Ireland to literary Dublin, to the hotbed intellectual and literary life of wartime and peacetime New York, and James Joyce’s émigré circle in 1930s Paris.
Mary and Padraic Colum is a chronicle of quiet friendship, romantic bonds, a longstanding marriage, and a fruitful intellectual partnership. The first joint biography of the Colums, it is a story of lives and dreams that deserves to be heard and celebrated.
'This highly original account of the extraordinarily rich and varied lives of Mary and Padraic Colum is not just welcome, but, given the magnitude of their legacy, an urgent rectification.'
– Barry McCrea, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame
'Told with subtlety and a keen eye for telling details, this biography is a touching portrait of a marriage, of lives lived in hardship among the elite of the New York scene, and of successes and disappointments in equal measure. It will be of interest to anyone who cares about how Irish literature became the toast of the world in the twentieth century.'
– Cóilín Parsons, Director of the Global Irish Studies Initiative, Georgetown University
'Fluently written and meticulously researched, this outstanding biography flows as compellingly as a novel. Kelleher achieves what is a hallmark of great biography: she conveys a picture of what her subjects ‘were like’, and the characters of Mary and Padraic Colum come luminously alive on her pages.' – Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Laureate for Irish Fiction (2025–8)
ISBN: 9781068502385
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
350 pages