MacMANUS, Seumas. The Rocky Road to Dublin. With Foreword by Irvin S. Cobb.

Dublin: Talbot Press, 1947. Octavo. First edition. pp. xii, 324. Quarter red cloth on green paper boards. A very good copy in very good repaired dust jacket.
MacManus’s engaging memoir of a life made on both sides of the Atlantic beginning in Donegal and running through the newspaper office, the lecture circuit, and the story-teller’s platform. In a companionable, anecdotal voice he recalls schooldays, the gathering of folklore, the craft of the seanchaí, and encounters with readers and audiences from Belfast to Boston. The Foreword by Irvin S. Cobb frames MacManus for an American public that had long embraced his tales.
Seumas MacManus (1868-1960) was a writer, folklorist and celebrated Donegal storyteller from Mountcharles. A former teacher, he turned to journalism and fiction, publishing widely in periodicals and issuing volumes of folk-tales and short stories that helped popularise Ulster lore. From the 1890s he lectured extensively in the United States, where he built a large readership; his best-known work, The Story of the Irish Race (1921), remained very popular for decades.

[CAT 162]