GREACEN, Robert. Patrick MacGill. Champion of the underdog.

Donegal: No date, c. 1980. Octavo. pp. 16. Printed stapled pictorial wrappers. A very good copy. Rare.
Patrick MacGill (1889-1963), poet and novelist, was born in Maas, Co. Donegal, and reared in Glenties, the ‘Glenmornan’ of his fiction. The eldest of eleven children from a poor Catholic family, he was sent to the Strabane hiring fairs at twelve and later emigrated to Scotland, working as a potato labourer, navvy, and railway worker, experiences that informed his most important prose works, Children of the Dead End and The Rat Pit. His first poetry collection, Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook, printed in Derry, attracted wide attention and led to patronage from Sir John Neale Dalton, royal chaplain, who secured him employment at Windsor Castle. MacGill briefly worked as a journalist on the Daily Express before returning to Donegal, where his novel Glenmornan provoked clerical hostility for its socialist and anti-clerical tone. Widely praised by contemporaries for the originality, lyric power, and authenticity of his verse, he remains a most compelling writer to emerge from early twentieth-century Ireland.

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