Walter Macken

Walter Macken, born in Galway, Ireland, on 3 May 1915, was an actor, playwright, and novelist whose career spanned the stage, screen, and page. He died on 22 April 1967, survived by his wife, Peggy, and their two sons.

Macken began his performing career primarily as a stage actor, working with the Taibhdhearc in Galway, where he also met his future wife, and later with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His theatrical work eventually brought him to Broadway, where he appeared in productions between 1951 and 1954. He took lead roles in two Broadway productions: M. J. Molloy's The King of Friday's Men and Home Is the Hero, the latter a play of his own authorship.

Beyond the stage, Macken built a substantial body of literary work encompassing novels, short stories, and plays. His third novel, Rain on the Wind, published by Macmillan in 1950, won the Literary Guild award in the United States, and its success allowed him to concentrate more fully on writing. Among his novels, he is particularly associated with a trilogy of Irish historical fiction comprising Seek the Fair Land, The Silent People, and The Scorching Wind, published between 1959 and 1964. His published plays include Mungo's Mansion, Vacant Possession, Home Is the Hero, and Twilight Is the Warrior. Two early novels, And Then No More and Cockles and Mustard, remain unpublished.

Macken also worked in film, appearing most notably in Arthur Dreifuss's adaptation of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow in 1962. A film version of his own play Home Is the Hero was released in 1959, and his children's novel Flight of the Doves was adapted for cinema, with a film released in 1971.

Much of Macken's writing drew on the Galway region of Connemara. In September 1966 he relocated to the Gaeltacht village of Menlo in County Galway, where he died suddenly the following April. His son Ultan Macken, a journalist working in both print and broadcast media in Ireland, later wrote a biography of his father titled Walter Macken: Dreams on Paper.