Publisher Description
A remarkable short story by the Nobel Literature Prize winner W. B. Yeats, steeped in Irish magic and folklore. When Red Hanrahan, the itinerant schoolmaster, drops into a remote barn where Irish farm laborers are drinking and singing, he receives a message from his sweetheart to make haste to her. Her mother has died and she must marry at once or be turned out of her home. Red Hanrahan gets up to start immediately, but a strange old man sitting by the door delays him by starting a game of cards with him. As Hanrahan gets drawn into the card game, he finds himself increasingly mesmerized … and then strange magical events take over, and he finds himself wandering over the mountains following a mysterious dreamlike hunt.
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About William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist. Born and educated in Dublin, he studied poetry in his youth and, from an early age, was fascinated by Irish legend and the occult. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. He is generally considered one of the twentieth century’s key English language poets. He was a Symbolist poet, in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. In 1923 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” He was the first Irishman so honored. He is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).