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Pages, 35. LIMITED EDITION number 107 of 270 copies. Set in Caslon type, and printed by Esther Ryan and Maire Gill on paper maed in Ireland and published by the Cuala Press, 133 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin. Finished in the second week of April, nineteen hundred and forty one.SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY. The inscription on title page reads: "Inscribed for Jack Hanlon Donagh MacDonagh May 1941". Presented by the author to the artist Father Jack Hanlon. Partially uncut at top edge of endpapers and title page. Rare. Donagh MacDonagh (1912-1968) was an Irish writer, judge, presenter, broadcaster, and playwright. He was born in Dublin. He was still a young child when his father Thomas MacDonagh, an Irish nationalist and poet, was executed in 1916. Tragedy struck again when his mother died of a heart attack a year afterwards while swimming at Skerries to Lambay, County Dublin in July 1917. The two children were then taken care of by their maternal aunts, in particular Catherine Wilson. His parents' families then engaged in a series of custody lawsuits, as the MacDonaghs were Roman Catholic and the Giffords were Protestant; in the climate of Ne Temere, the MacDonaghs were successful. He and his sister Barbara (who later married actor Liam Redmond) lived briefly with their paternal aunt Eleanor Bingham, County Clare before being put into the custody of strangers until their late teens, when they were taken in by Jack MacDonagh. He was married twice, to Maura Smyth and, following her death after she drowned in a bath whilst having an epileptic seizure, to her sister, Nuala Smyth. He had four children, Iseult & Breifne by Maura and Niall & Barbara by Nuala. He died on 1 January 1968 and is buried at Deans Grange Cemetery. MacDonagh was educated at Belvedere College and University College Dublin (UCD) with contemporaries Cyril Cusack, Denis Devlin, Charlie Donnelly, Brian O'Nolan, Niall Sheridan and Mervyn Wall. In 1935 he was called to the Bar and practised on the Western Circuit. In 1941 he was appointed a District Justice in County Mayo. He was Justice for the Dublin Metropolitan Courts at the time of his death He published three volumes of poetry: "Veterans and Other Poems" (1941), The Hungry Grass (1947) and A Warning to Conquerors (1968). He also edited the Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1958) with Lennox Robinson. He also wrote poetic dramas and ballad operas. One play, Happy As Larry, was translated into a number of languages. He had three other plays produced: God's Gentry (1951, a ballad opera about the tinkers), Lady Spider (1959, about Deirdre of the Sorrows and the Three sons of Ussna and by far his best writing) and Step in the Hollow a piece of situation comedy nonsense. He also wrote short stories; published Twenty Poems with Niall Sheridan; staged the first Irish production of ??Murder in the Cathedral?? with Liam Redmond, later his brother-in-law; and was a popular broadcaster on Radio Éireann. Seller Inventory # 015917
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