The first joint biography of literary couple Mary and Padraic Colum, tracing a story of deep friendship, enduring romance, and fruitful intellectual partnership. 

Mary Colum was an influential reviewer and critic, feared for her rapier wit by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Her husband Padraic Colum was a successful author of children’s stories, a poet, playwright, essayist, and like Mary, a political activist. Their careers followed very different trajectories of ambition, success, disappointment and fulfilment—sometimes compatible and collaborative, but also competitive and opposed. Mary and Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dream follows their journeys from rural Ireland to literary Dublin, through to wartime and peacetime New York, Paris, Nice, and Hawaii. This meticulous and long-overdue excavation is the first joint biography of the Colums. Their five-decade love story was a chronicle of the cultural and political foment of early twentieth-century Ireland, James Joyce’s émigré circle in 1930s Paris, and the hotbed intellectual and literary life of New York from World War I to the 1960s. But now, in the histories of twentieth-century Irish literature and of New York literary circles, Mary and Padraic Colum are unjustly forgotten. Drawing from a wealth of previously unknown archival materials, this work provides a close-up study of a writing couple whose literary lives and legacy spanned decades and continents. After landing in Ellis Island for a three-month trip in 1914, they stayed at first eight years, and then made America their permanent home. Tracing their lives from childhoods in Ireland, to Mary’s death in 1957 and Padraic’s in 1972, this book casts new light on the changing cultural relations between Ireland and America and argues compellingly for the lasting significance of their joint literary legacies.