Thomas Mayne Reid

Ballyroney is the small County Down hamlet where Thomas Mayne Reid was born in 1818, a beginning that mattered because it produced one of the nineteenth century’s most vivid adventure writers. His father wanted a Presbyterian minister, but the boy left school without graduating and eventually crossed the Atlantic, carrying the hunger for motion and conflict that later filled his novels. Reid wrote about America, Mexico and the wider world with such force that his stories remained beloved in Eastern Europe long after they faded from Western memory.