Maurice Walsh

Maurice Walsh was born in Ballydonoghue, near Listowel, County Kerry. He inherited from his father, a farmer, a deep love of books and tales which later led him to pen his own first stories while working as a British civil servant in Scotland. Walsh returned to Ireland in 1922 and joined the Revenue office of the newly established Irish Free State. Over the next four decades he published twenty books, including The Key Above the Door, which received praise from J. M. Barrie, Blackcock's Feather, Green Rushes, and The Road to Nowhere. His works enjoyed great popularity and one of them, The Quiet Man, first published in the American Saturday Evening Post in 1933 and included in Green Rushes, served as the basis to Tom Ford's 1952 Oscar-winning film of the same name, starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. Three years after his retirement from the Irish civil service, Walsh became the President of PEN Ireland. He died in Dublin in 1964.