Irish writer, critic and scholar Mary Colum (1887-1957) was born in Ireland and studied literature at the National University of Ireland in Dublin. Her studies of the Irish Literary Revival piqued a lifelong interest that influenced Colum’s later works. After graduating, Colum taught English to university students, eventually founding a literary journal, The Irish Review. Colum frequently published short stories and essays and was determined to write a novel. But inspired by W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde, she soon turned her focus to critical writing, which she believed could be just as creative and artistic as fiction.
Colum and her husband, Padraic Colum moved to New York City in 1914 to escape unrest in Ireland due to the World War. In the United States, Colum published numerous reviews and a critical book, From These Roots: The Ideas That Have Made Modern Literature, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature, Scribner’s, The Nation, Yale Review and New York Herald Tribune Books. She wrote a regular column, “Life and Literature,” for Forum and Century from 1933 to 1940. Colum and her husband were also a frequent Fellows at MacDowell, residing 12 times between 1921 and 1950. She is well known for her autobiography, Life and the Dream, which was published in 1947. She was co-writing Our Friend James Joyce with her husband when she died in 1957.
