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Twitter: @UCDPressStandish James O'Grady (1846-1928) is known principally for his two-volume History of Ireland published in 1878 and 1880 and for his role in the Irish Literary Revival. He worked as a journalist on the Daily Express, the Dublin-based unionist newspaper, until 1898; after 1898 he edited his own newspapers and wrote for others including The Irish Worker. Edward A. Hagan is Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author High Nonsensical Words (Whitston, 1986), a study of O'Grady, and edited O'Grady's To the Leaders of Our Working People for the Classics of Irish History series.
Sun and Wind was Standish James O'Grady's last work, which he was editing at the time of his death in 1928. Some parts of it were published as journal articles in his lifetime, but most is published here for the first time. Edward A. Hagan describes O'Grady as 'at once a political polemicist, a creative writer, and a somewhat unusual historian', involved in all three roles in this utopian treatise which 'reveals the pervasive influence of classical scholarship upon the Irish intellectual life of the period'. O'Grady argues for drastic change in Ireland in the first part and in the second makes extensive use of classical Greece as a model for Ireland.