James Stephens

James Stephens, born in Dublin, Ireland, was an Irish novelist and poet. His father died when Stephens was two years old, and his mother remarried when he was six years old. He attended school with his adoptive brothers, Thomas and Richard Collins, before graduating as a solicitor's clerk. By the early 1900s Stephens was increasingly inclined to socialism and the Irish language (he spoke and wrote Irish) and by 1912 was a dedicated Irish Republican. He was a close friend of the 1916 leader, Thomas MacDonagh, who was then editor of The Irish Review and deputy headmaster in St Enda's, and later manager of the Irish Theatre. His growing nationalism brought a schism with his adoptive family, but probably won him his job as registrar in the National Gallery of Ireland, where he worked from 1915-25, having previously had an ill-paid job with a firm of solicitors.

Stephens produced many retellings of Irish myths which are marked by a rare combination of humour and lyricism. He also wrote several original novels (The Crock of Gold, Etched in Moonlight, Demi-Gods) based loosely on Irish wonder tales. Stephens began his career as a poet under the tutelage of poet and painter Æ (George William Russell). Stephens's first book of poems, Insurrections, was published in 1909. His last book, Kings and the Moon, published in 1938, was also a volume of verse.

Stephens's influential account of the 1916 Easter Rising, Insurrection in Dublin, describes the effect of the deaths by execution of his friend Thomas MacDonagh and others as being "like watching blood oozing from under a door". MacDonagh was the first of the leaders who was tried and shot.

Stephens later lived between Paris, London and Dublin. During the 1930s he was a friend of James Joyce. During the last decade of his life, Stephens found a new audience through a series of broadcasts on the BBC.

Source: Wikipedia