This book includes all the leading Irish writers and some of the lesser known: playwrights, novelists, short story writers, poets. It places them in context and provides a list of their works. Commentaries give brief but telling insights into their work.

The story of Irish writing is followed, beginning with Swift, and working through playwrights Synge and O'Casey to Beckett and Friel; in novels, from Maria Edgeworth, through Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Flann O'Brien to contemporaries Julia O'Faolain and Roddy Doyle; from nineteenth-century poetry through Yeats to Paul Durcan.