John Millington Synge

John Millington Synge was born in Rathfarnham, County Dublin, on 16 April 1871, the youngest of eight children in a wealthy Anglo-Irish home. He later co-founded the Abbey Theatre with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, using that stage to give voice to the rural worlds he travelled and imagined. His play The Playboy of the Western World provoked riots in Dublin because it portrayed poor peasants with brutal clarity and ended in tragedy rather than comfort. Synge died in 1909 at age thirty-seven, still writing, leaving behind work that reshaped Irish drama and influenced later writers such as Samuel Beckett.