Synge, (Edmund) J(ohn) M(illington) 1871-1909
Irish dramatist

Born near Dublin, he attended Trinity College, Dublin, and studied music in Germany. He then spent several years in Paris on literary pursuits until, on the advice of W B Yeats, he settled among the people of the Aran Islands (1899-1902), who provided the material for his plays In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and his humorous masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World (1907), which was followed by The Tinker's Wedding (1909). He published Poems and Translations (1909), and completed his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows (published posthumously in 1910), while dying from Hodgkin's Disease. He had a profound influence on the next generation of Irish playwrights and was a director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, from 1904.

Bibliography: H H Green and E M Stephens, J. M. Synge (1959)