Donn Byrne was born Brian Oswald Patrick Donn-Byrne on 20 November 1889. His South Armagh parents were on
a business trip to the United States when Donn Byrne was born in New York. The family returned to Ireland soon after
the birth.
Byrne says of his family: "We were about the only one of the four big Irish families of the gap in the North to still keep our mouths, if not our heads, above water." At fourteen, he met Bulmer Hobson, founder of Irish volunteer movement. Hobson took him to an early meeting of the volunteers (1906), when he was accompanied by Robert Lynd of the London Daily News. Lynd wrote of that meeting, mentioning the singing of a little fair haired boy (Donn-Byrne). Through Hobson, he acquired a taste for Irish history and nationalism that the culture was deeply immersed in at the time. He entered local Irish festivals (Feiseanna) using the name Brian O'Beirne, and he frequently won. He was equally fluent in Irish and English, growing up in an area were Gaelic was still spoken.
In 1907 he went to the University of Dublin to study Romance languages. While at the school he published in The National Student, the student magazine. At this time he also met Dorothea (Dolly) Cadogan. After graduation he moved to Paris and Leipzig to continue his studies at the Sorbonne and Leipzig University, with the hope of joining the British Foreign Office as a diplomat. He turned down his PhD. when he learned that he would have to wear evening clothes to his early morning examinations, which no true Irish gentleman would ever do.
He gave up his hope of being a diplomat in 1911 and moved to New York. Here he began working first for the Catholic Encyclopedia, the New Standard Dictionary, and then the Century Dictionary. On December 2nd, 1911 he married Dolly in Brooklyn, NY. They had four children. Soon after (February 1912) his poem "The Piper" appeared in Harper's magazine. His first short story, "Battle," sold to Smart Set magazine for $50.00, appearing in the February 1914 issue. At this time he also tried his hand at journalism but decided to be a freelance writer.
More of his stories sold to various magazines such as Scribner's and Ladies Home Journal. Some of these were anthologized in his first book, Stories Without Women, 1915. He soon earned the financial security he needed to begin working on his first novel, The Stranger's Banquet (1919). The novel Field of Honor was published posthumously in 1929. His poems were collected into an anthology and published as Poems (1934).
The early novels can be said to be quite mediocre, noted as "potboilers" by Thurston Macauley, Byrne's earliest biographer. Polo tells the story of the Italian adventurer, and Wind is a romantic novel of the sea. Both show some highly lyrical passages intermixed with the plain language of real life. With Raftery, however, the author seems to reinvent the saga style, the prose breaking off into musical verse now and then as it tells the story of a blind poet wandering Ireland and avenging his wife's dishonor.
His later novels invited comparison with Irish novelist George Moore, especially in their romance and historical themes. It was with Hangman's, though, that he began to identify himself with the traditional Irish storytellers, noting in his preface ("A Foreward to Foreigner's") that: "I have written a book of Ireland for Irishmen. Some phrase, some name in it may conjure up the world they knew as children." It is also in this novel that Byrne returns to his Irish nationalist ideas by alluding to the ongoing strife of the Irish Civil War and fight for Independence.
Despite both his wife's success as a playwright, and his own increasing popularity as an author, the family's financial straits forced them to sell up their house in Riverside, Connecticut and return to Ireland. Eventually the family buys Coolmain Castle near Bandon in County Cork. He lived here until his death in a car accident.
Byrne seems to have been caught up in the neo-Romantic view of the mythical and pastoral beauty of Irish history. His writing hauntingly evokes these images, sometimes seeming want to preserve them. "It seemed to me," he says in Wind, "that I was capturing for an instant a beauty that was dying slowly, imperceptibly, but would soon be gone."
He is buried in Rathclarin churchyard, near Coolmain Castle. His headstone reads, in Irish and English: "I am in my sleeping and don't waken me."[1]
1
The bells of heather
The cry of the plover
We travel sleeping,
The wind is hid in the mountain. The leaves
Quoted from the National Geographic version. (Vol. 51, no. 3, March 1927, page 316).
Sleepy June weather
Has drawn a blue hood over
To the Land of No Weeping,
The hawk is caged in the darkness. The field-
Now I am in my sleeping, and don't waken me.
Tha mee mo hulloo is na dhooshy may!
Tha mee mo hulloo is na dhooshy may!
I am in my sleeping and don't waken me!