Winner of the 1993 American Ireland Fund Literary Award. MacMahon is one of Ireland's great writers, a teacher who, to use his own inimitable phrase, has left 'the track of his teeth on a parish for three generations'. This account of his life has all the magic, drama, love of language, and love of Ireland that has made him famous as a talker, ballad-maker, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer of international stature.