John Millington Synge, who along with William Butler Yeats and Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory spearheaded the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, was chiefly inspired by the four trips he took to the Aran Islands in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Synge was born into a prominent, if fading, landholding family of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. After taking his degree at Trinity College, Dublin, he used his modest income to live...