J. M. Synge

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was an Irish playwright, born into a Protestant family near Dublin. He studied music and languages in Germany and Paris, where W. B. Yeats urged him in 1896 to go to the Aran Islands and write about the life he found there. Several summers among the islanders gave him the material for Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, and for the prose book The Aran Islands. The Playboy of the Western World provoked riots at the Abbey Theatre in 1907. He died of Hodgkin's disease at thirty-seven, leaving Deirdre of the Sorrows unfinished.