James Stephens

James Stephens (c. 1880–1950) was an Irish poet and novelist of the literary revival. Raised in poverty in Dublin, he worked as a clerk and typist until the poet AE encouraged his writing. His novel The Crock of Gold, a comic fantasy of philosophers, gods and leprechauns, won wide acclaim in 1912, and his account of the Easter Rising in Dublin, The Insurrection in Dublin, was written as an eyewitness. He retold the old Irish sagas in Irish Fairy Tales and Deirdre, wrote several volumes of poems, was a friend of James Joyce, and in later life lived in London and broadcast for the BBC.