St John Ervine was the most prominent Ulster writer of the early twentieth-century and a major Irish dramatist whose work influenced the plays of W.B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey. The Wayward Man was the first novel to explore the character, and conflicts, of Belfast.

John Greer Ervine was born on December 28th 1883 in Ballymacarret in east Belfast, at the time Belfast’s shipyard suburb, to deaf-mute parents. Every member of his family had been born in County Down for 300 years. His father, a printer, died soon after his birth and the family moved in with Ervine’s grandmother who ran a small shop. Ervine became an insurance clerk in a Belfast office at the age of 17 and shortly after he moved to London.

In London the young Ervine met George Bernard Shaw and began to write journalism as well as his first plays, adopting the name St John Ervine as more fitting for his ambitions. His first full-length play, Mixed Marriage, was produced by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1911. It was produced several times over the following years as one of the Abbey’s most profitable plays. W.B. Yeats supported Ervine’s plays for depicting the real life experienced by the people of the north of Ireland as Synge’s work had done for those of the west of Ireland.

In 1915 W.B. Yeats appointed Ervine as the Abbey’s general manager. Ervine’s tenure was a commercial success, placing the Abbey’s finances on a stable footing, after producing several successful comedies but his strict demands on the actors caused a mutiny (the conflict with the Abbey’s actors was exacerbated by Ervine’s outrage at the Easter Rising of 1916). Ervine resigned from the Abbey in 1916 and enlisted in the Dublin Fusiliers. He was made an officer but after being wounded in Flanders one of his legs had to be amputated.

Through the 1920’s and 1930’s Ervine wrote drawing-room comedies that were box-office successes, several had West End runs of up to two years. Ervine was also a theatre reviewer for the Observer from 1919 to 1939 and in 1936 Ervine’s Boyd’s Shop, the play that defined Northern Irish drama for decades, was produced. Alongside his plays Ervine wrote a number of novels. The Wayward Man was reprinted in 1936 as one of Allen Lane’s first Penguin paperbacks (as Penguin 32). He also produced several major biographies, including the official biography of James Craig Craigavon: Ulsterman and Bernard Shaw, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956.

By the 1940’s St John Ervine was Northern Ireland’s most prominent writer but was a highly controversial figure who had developed a remarkable antipathy to southern Ireland. St John Ervine died in 1971.