Mary and Paraic Colum: Lives the Dream

Mary Colum was an influential reviewer and critic, feared for her rapier wit by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Her husband Padraic Colum was a successful author of children’s stories, a poet, playwright and essayist, and like Mary a political activist. But now, in the histories of Irish literature and of New York literary circles, Mary and Padraic Colum are unjustly forgotten. Drawing from a wealth of previously unknown archival materials, this work provides a close-up study of a writing couple whose literary lives and legacy spanned decades and continents. It follows their journeys from rural Ireland to literary Dublin, to the hotbed intellectual and literary life of wartime and peacetime New York, and James Joyce’s émigré circle in 1930s Paris. Mary and Padraic Colum is a chronicle of quiet friendship, romantic bonds, a longstanding marriage, and a fruitful intellectual partnership. The first joint biography of the Colums, it is a story of lives and dreams that deserves to be heard and celebrated.