John Millington Synge

John Millington Synge
John Millington Synge
Born	Edmund John Millington Synge (1871-04-16)16 April 1871 Rathfarnham, County Dublin, Ireland
Died	24 March 1909(1909-03-24) (aged 37) Elpis Nursing Home, Dublin, Ireland
Nationality	Irish (British subject)
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, essayist
Known for	Drama, fictional prose
Movement	Folklore Irish Literary Revival

Edmund John Millington Synge (/sɪŋ/; 16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, travel writer and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre.

Although he came from a privileged Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Synge developed Hodgkin's disease, a metastatic cancer that was then untreatable. He died several weeks short of his 38th birthday as he was trying to complete his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Synge was born in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin, on 16 April 1871. He was the youngest son in a family of eight children. His parents were members of the Protestant upper middle class. his father, John Hatch Synge, who was a barrister, came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow. He is an uncle to the brothers, mathematician John Lighton Synge and optical microscopy pioneer Edward Hutchinson Synge. Synge's grandfather, also named John Hatch Synge, was an admirer of the educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and founded an experimental school on the family estate. Synge's mother had a private income from lands in County Galway, although her father, Robert Traill, had been a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, County Cork, and a member of the Schull Relief Committee during the Great Irish Famine (1845–1849).