J. M. Synge

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was born near Dublin to a Protestant landowning family, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and spent several restless years in Germany, Italy, and Paris before W. B. Yeats, whom he met there in 1896, urged him to return to Ireland and find his subject among its own people. Synge's repeated visits to the Aran Islands, off the Galway coast, gave him both the material and the rhythms of peasant speech that shaped his plays for the Irish National Theatre, which he helped found with Yeats and Lady Gregory and which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. The Playboy of the Western World (1907), his best-known work, provoked riots at its Abbey premiere over its frank, unromantic portrait of Irish rural life; The Well of the Saints (1905) had already shown the same unsentimental eye. He died in Dublin of Hodgkin's disease at thirty-seven, before completing his final play, Deirdre of the Sorrows.