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Luck of the Irish: Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Part 3 — 3 Comments

  1. Silver, you won't regret it. Kavanagh's 1903 book Darby O'Gill and the Good People is still in print and can be found on Amazon; there's even a Kindle edition. (For some reason Blogger won't let me post a link, but a search for the title in Books will take you where I wanted to link you.)

    Her 1926 follow-up, Ashes of Old Dreams and Other Darby O'Gill Tales, is less easy to come by, but there are still second-hand copies out there. (I'm reading one now, and it clears up a couple of points: (1) Darby and Bridget O'Gill have eight children; and (2) "These tales are written as told in a jaunting car by Jerry Murtaugh, the Reliable Driver who goes between Kilcuny and Ballinderg.")

    The stories are doubly valuable in that besides being delightful reading in their own right, they provide an education in how a good screenwriter can preserve exactly the spirit of a work while including hardly a word of the actual text. Lawrence Edward Watkin has never gotten enough credit for that.