The Quiet Man

The Quiet Man is a partially fictionalized memoir of the life of the author’s grandfather, Anthony Ward, the quiet man of the title. The narrative moves back and forth from Tony’s boyhood days on the family croft in rural Donegal, Ireland, to his time in Dublin as a young man, and to his old age in the industrial city of Glasgow, Scotland. Tony was born near the end of the nineteenth century and his first language and that of his people was Irish Gaelic. Along the way Tony is swept up in the momentous events of the Easter Rising in Dublin and the war for Irish independence that followed. These events and many others of his life make him, in his mature years, a “quiet man” of intimate thought. He lived a dutiful, modest life, and this book is a moving tribute to the man and his generation of Irishmen and all they stood for in their long, hard lives when family and honor were everything.