Standish O'Grady - Softcover

Standish James O'Grady (1846-1928) was an Irish author, journalist, and historian. His father was the Reverend Thomas O'Grady, the scholarly Church of Ireland minister of Castletown Berehaven, County Cork. He was a cousin of Standish Hayes O'Grady, another noted figure in Celtic literature. After an initial lukewarm response to his writing on the legendary past in History of Ireland: Heroic Period (1878-81) and Early Bardic Literature, Ireland (1879), he realized that the public wanted romance, and so followed the example of James McPherson in recasting Irish legends in literary form, producing historical novels including The Coming of Cuculain (1894), The Chain of Gold (1895) and The Flight of the Eagle (1897).Standish James O'Grady's important but little-known pieces from The Irish Worker, written in 1912-13. Although O'Grady has usually been regarded as a Protestant unionist, he was always a maverick and, later in life, shared the columns of The Irish Worker with socialists such as Jim Larkin, James Connolly and Sean O'Casey. He makes militant statements against capitalism and uses military vocabulary to advocate a commune system. He would not have supported armed insurrection, yet his rhetoric is a stirring call for action.