Maurice Walsh(1879–1964)

Maurice Walsh was born at Ballydonoghue near Listowel in north County Kerry on the twenty-first of April 1879, fifth child of John Walsh, a small Kerry farmer and bookseller of the Listowel district, and Elizabeth Buckley of Glin in County Limerick. The Walsh house at Ballydonoghue carried his father's working library of two hundred volumes, the literature on which the boy was raised; he was schooled at Lisselton national school and at St Michael's College, Listowel, and at twenty-one in 1900 took the Customs and Excise entrance examination at the British Civil Service, was assigned to the Inland Revenue Excise division, and posted to Limerick, Wexford and then in 1901 to the Customs station at Cahirciveen on the south-west Kerry coast.

He served in the Customs across the next twenty-two years at successive small-distillery and Customs postings in the Scottish Highlands (Stornoway 1903, Forres 1903 to 1908, Tain 1908 to 1912, Inverness 1912 to 1914, Glasgow 1915 to 1918, Dufftown 1918 to 1922). The long years in the Speyside whisky country and the Black Isle gave him the working knowledge of the Highland geography and people that became the central setting of his early novels. He met his wife Caroline Begg of Aberlour in 1905 in the Speyside posting and married her there in 1908. He transferred to the new Irish Customs service on the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and served as Inspector of Customs at the Dublin Castle headquarters until his retirement on full pension in 1933 at fifty-four.

He had published his first novel The Key Above the Door, set in the Scottish Highlands, with Chambers of Edinburgh in 1926 in his forty-seventh year. The book sold modestly on first publication; it was the eight-thousand-word short story The Quiet Man, published in the Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia in February 1933 in his fifty-fourth year, that established his international reputation. The story (the returned American-Irish prizefighter Shawn Kelvin coming home to the Kerry village of his birth and the courtship of the red-haired farmer's sister Ellen) is the central short fiction of the Irish-American return-home register of the 1930s. It was the first of a long sequence of Walsh novels and short stories built on the same returned-American-Irish premise: The Small Dark Man (1929), Blackcock's Feather (1932), Trouble in the Glen (1950), and the Kerry-and-Highland short-story collections Green Rushes (1935), And No Quarter (1937), The Hill is Mine (1940), and the John Sleeman Tales (1941).

John Ford bought the screen rights to The Quiet Man story in 1936 for ten dollars and the promise of a thousand dollars more on production. The production was held up by Ford's other commitments and by the difficulty Ford had finding a studio willing to back a colour location-shot film set in Ireland; Republic Pictures finally took the production in 1951 on the security of Ford's Hollywood reputation and the casting of John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. The film was shot on location at Cong, County Mayo, in the summer of 1951, was released in September 1952, took the Academy Award for Best Director (Ford's fourth, the only person in Academy history to win four directing Oscars) and Best Cinematography in Colour at the March 1953 ceremony, was the highest-grossing Republic Pictures film of all time, and remains the central single film representation of Ireland to twentieth-century world audiences. He continued the writing into the 1950s, was elected to the Irish Academy of Letters in 1936, was awarded an honorary D.Litt by the National University of Ireland in 1961, and died at Blackrock, County Dublin, on the eighteenth of February 1964 in his eighty-fifth year. The Walsh name in modern Irish-American popular culture carries the weight of the short story of February 1933 and the John Ford film of 1952.