He opened his eyes slowly, aware that noise in the room had interrupted his sleep. He stared at the ceiling, studying the familiar lines and cracks that criss-crossed above his head. The pattern the lines and cracks he saw this morning formed what looked like a baseball diamond. He found home base, then 1st, 2nd and 3rd. he heard the crack of bat against ball and could feel the rush of adrenalin required to run to 1st base. The ball went down the middle-he rounded 1st, passed 2nd and stole 3rd when the centerfielder dropped the ball.

This book concerns Tomás O'Crohan of the Blasket Islands and offers a radical reinterpretation of this iconic Irish figure and his place in Gaelic literature. It examines the politics of Irish culture that turned O'Crohan into «The Islandman» and harnessed his texts to the national political project, presenting him as an instinctual, natural hero and a naïve, almost unwilling writer, and his texts as artefacts of unselfconscious, unmediated linguistic and ethnographic authenticity. The author demonstrates that such misleading claims, never properly scrutinised before this study, have been to the detriment of the author's literary reputation and that they have obscured the deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic purpose and nature of his writing. At the core of the book is a recognition that what O'Crohan wrote was not primarily a history, nor an ethnography, but an autobiography. The book demonstrates that the conventional reading of the texts, which privileges O'Crohan's fisherman identity, has hidden from view the writer protagonist inscribed in the texts, subordinating his identity as a writer to his identity as a peasant. The author shows O'Crohan to have been a literary pioneer who negotiated the journey from oral tradition into literature as well as a modern, self-aware man of letters engaging deliberately and artistically with questions of mortality.